


endgame

by camicazi



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Action & Romance, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Betrayal, Childhood Friends Chansoo, M/M, MAMA Era Powers (EXO), Mutual Pining, This Was Supposed To Be Enemies to Lovers, chansoo as the ship that argues while getting shot at
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:21:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 32,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28365339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/camicazi/pseuds/camicazi
Summary: Experiment 61 knows how to take risks.He knows what to gamble, and most importantly, he knows how to win.When the Motherheart goes missing, he is sent to hunt down Agent 12—someone who will teach him how to lose in ways he’d never known before.
Relationships: Do Kyungsoo | D.O/Park Chanyeol
Comments: 27
Kudos: 79
Collections: Magika Astra: Round 1





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> written for: Magika Astra Fest [MA20-101]
> 
> i hope you guys enjoy :>
> 
> [also i couldn't put it in the tags but there'll be sekai and baekxing!! blink and you'll miss em tho baekxing is practically hiding]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i just think the character kyungsoo played for room no. 7 (taejung) is neat

The first mark is unique.

Chanyeol’s is a dark slash along his wrist, something Mom says is the paint stroke of fate. 

His completing mark is molten gold, flashing across his eyes.

Chanyeol stares at his father, eyes focused as he answers his question about soulmates.

“There are people who believe in them,” his father says, taking the storybook Chanyeol’s been reading.

On the page is an illustration—two foxes, one red, one white, staring out on a moonlit field.

_i’ve been hoping for you_

_—i’m sorry, did you wait too long?—_

“And there are people that don’t.”

“Why not?” little Chanyeol asks.

He knows that soulmates don’t exist; there will be no words that might tattoo themselves on some part of his body for another person to find.

“I think a soulmate would be nice to have.”

But Chanyeol is only five.

To him, everything is suspended in disbelief, framed by wonder only his age can provide—the possibility of soulmates just as big as the possibility of wingless dragons in the mountains and spirits in public bathrooms.

His mother could make fire dance, after all.

His father comes back home with stories of terrifying oceans and foreign countries and spices that burn your tongue more than flames ever could.

Soulmates sounded tame.

“Some people don’t like it when things aren’t in their control,” his father says. He opens up his arms, and Chanyeol makes his way across their couch to crawl into them. “Some people don’t like to be told who they’re allowed to love.”

“Did you have a soulmate?”

His father’s laugh rumbles through his little body. “That's a silly thing to ask.”

“I don’t know,” Chanyeol mumbles, “you and Mom fight a lot.”

“Soulmates are a tricky business,” his father says, smile in his voice. “Who knows, Channie? You and your soulmate might even fight more than me and Mom.”

Chanyeol shakes his head. “My soulmate’s going to be gentle, like me.”

His father leans in press a kiss to his cheek.

“ _Are_ you gentle?”

“Of course,” Chanyeol pouts. “I helped that bird yesterday.”

His father stares at him, and little Chanyeol doesn’t understand yet—but he feels it—something fond, manifesting in the crinkle of his eyes and the small tilt to his lips, the way the cage around Chanyeol’s middle tightens when he yawns.

"Of course." 

His father carries him up and over to his room, and Chanyeol lets the warm glow of their fairy lights lead him into drowsiness.

“’M going to make my own soulmate,” Chanyeol mutters, when his father is tucking a pillow between his legs.

“I don’t think it works that way,” his father whispers. “Maybe you can look for them when you’re older.”

“Noooo,” Little Chanyeol says, “I’m going to make them.”

Chanyeol means _love—_ he’s going to make his own love, start it from scratch or make it better, like he does with his building blocks and the bread dough Mom lets him do.

He means he’s going to make a love that’s chosen by him and not the stars, means that he’s going to hold it as tight as he can when he finally meets it. 

Dad always said it was Mom and Chanyeol that carried all the passion in the family.

_do you suppose we are foolish?_

_—for what?—_

_for believing in destiny._

Chanyeol’s earliest memory is running through a park to look for rabbits. Rare friends, always hiding from him, but they were good friends nonetheless.

Mom finds him through a trail of blackened ground.

He tells her a joke, because he always sees her turn her sweetest smiles on Dad to get away with hiding the chocolate cake, peering up through his lashes so she laughs instead of scolds him for straying from the paths.

But she does neither.

Only gets on her knees and hugs him, especially long. Especially tight.

Chanyeol does not know why she asks for forgiveness.

_—do you not trust the stars? are you not happy to see your soulmate?—_

_not quite._

_i am not fond of the stars._

In the building filled with colorful hallways and white coats, Chanyeol is told about Regens and marks and being different.

They throw a beam over his wrist, flash painful lights in his eyes. They have him press his hand on a machine.

They tell him that fire-wielders have always been powerful.

“Just like Mom?” he asks, but no one answers.

Chanyeol is seven years old; he peeps through a crack in the door and watches a man in a suit call him undiscovered potential and fascinating and dangerous.

He doesn’t know what his flames can do yet.

Does not care.

Mom brings him back every month, and then every two weeks, and then every three days.

She circles the dates and doesn’t lose the tension in her shoulders until Chanyeol smiles with ice cream stains on his cheeks.

She asks him if he would like to learn more about his powers, softly, nervously, as if she’s hoping against all hope that he refuses.

 _Of course,_ he says, _of course I do._

Chanyeol smiles in front of his classmates, smiling like how he practiced in front of the mirror the night before.

The class stays silent.

They do not welcome him.

_—is it because i am different?—_

_no._

_it is because i am untrusting of everything._

Chanyeol doesn’t know the boy’s name.

He hasn’t bothered to learn it.

“You’re Chanyeol,” the boy says. Small for their age, face full and cheeks even fuller. “The fire-boy.”

He hasn’t felt loneliness quite like this before in his eight-year-old life; ankle throbbing from the bottom up, about to be called some mean name behind the school’s walls.

This boy would be no different from the ones that scowled at him, sometimes silent in their annoyance at his existence, sometimes not.

Chanyeol is too busy trying to block the sob tearing its way through his throat to bring up a decent defense, so he waits, bottom lip quivering.

For what—he’s too scared to guess.

“Does it hurt?”

The boy takes a step closer.

Chanyeol flinches away.

It’s a mistake.

His ankle _screams,_ and Chanyeol screams with it, sharp pain clutching at his legs.

The next thing Chanyeol knows is a light hand, running from his knee downwards.

"Don't move," the boy says, searching Chanyeol’s face as he does—his eyes are so _wide_ —going slower and slower the more Chanyeol grimaces.

“Got it.”

“Please,” Chanyeol whimpers, “please don’t—”

“Have you been here long?” the boy interrups, gaze surprisingly calm. “What happened?”

“I was running,” Chanyeol tries, breaths quickening when the boy sets his hands on his ankle. “And there was this— _ah_ —”

“Keep going,” the boy mutters, brows furrowed. His hands halt directly where the throbbing is coming from. “You’re doing good.”

“There was this log, and I couldn’t— _ah!”_

“Sorry, just—” the boy shakes his head, as if trying to clear it.

A constant pressure makes itself known, and he winces when Chanyeol lets out another sob.

“Just—just keep talking. I have to set it so you don’t move it around. There was a log, and?”

“And I-I tripped,” Chanyeol lets out.

He forces himself to get used to the hard air limiting the movement around his leg.

“I couldn’t—I tried to walk, but there was this hole and....”

“You fell again?”

The boy 's brows furrow in disbelief, hands already wrapping the cloth around his ankle. _Just like hyung,_ he whispers, under his breath. Around his toes, under his foot.

“Clumsy.”

The cast is neat, if limiting.

The boy tells him to wait.

“Don’t leave me,” Chanyeol says. “Please, I—I need help and—”

“I have to go get them,” the boy cocks his head to the side. “I’m not strong enough to carry you and keep your ankle still.”

And then it dawns on him, flashing through the pages of their books, figures surrounded by floating blocks of earth.

“Force,” he states simply, “you wield force.”

The boy crinkles his nose.

In class, Force is taught as something separate from the other elements—not like fire or water or true earth that humanity had long ago learned to master.

It was a _tertiary_ element, surpassing even electricity and space: force was innate, they said, and yet not—coming from anywhere and anything.

Wielders needed conduits. An element so complicated needed a proper channel, lest the wielder lose control.

“You could’ve—“ Chanyeol chokes out, “you could’ve _broken my legs_ —“

“But I didn’t,” the boy clips.

He leaves, goes to run with a muffled _I’ll come back,_ and Chanyeol doesn’t know how much time passes before gentle hands dig under his back and place him on something soft.

When he wakes up, he’s in the nurse’s office, pressed up against the wall.

His ankle is covered in a small cast, and the boy is reading a picture book beside his head.

He tells Chanyeol that they found him sleeping on the grass, and that he got a sticker set (proudly shoved in Chanyeol’s face) for being so brave.

Chanyeol frowns. “You only helped me because you knew you’d get a sticker set?” 

The boy frowns back, clearly offended. 

“Dumbo," the boy pouts. The nickname is strangely soft when it’s uttered from the boy’s lips, losing the edge others usually carried to make fun of his ears. "That's mean to say. You don't even know my name."

Mom says Chanyeol is a bad liar, so he stays silent.

He forgets that Mom also says silence can be louder than any lie you might want to say.

“Taejung,” the boy says, reading the blatant question in the air.

Like this, Chanyeol admits that he looks friendlier than their other classmates, wide eyes clear of any other inflection than curiosity.

“Can you roast marshmallows?”

“What kind of question is that?”

Chanyeol quickly relents when he sees the boy’s face.

“Yes." Here is a friend, or at the very least an ally, in the making. "I can roast marshmallows. Do you want me to?”

Taejung nods, rubbing his hands together. “Hyung bought me this whole box.” 

When Mom finally barges into the door, guilty-looking teachers in tow, Chanyeol introduces Taejung as a friend. 

Taejung’s charts are much like his.

They follow the same lines and curves, the same levels of power.

Their teachers had only looked surprised when they started seeing them together—their powers were an uncommon combination—but they had caught on fast.

Taejung did not like following them, turning his nose at what he knew were inferior methods, _my brother told me to do it like this,_ he’d argue, but they discovered that he would listen to Chanyeol. 

He would follow if Chanyeol needed him to.

“But Chanyeol doesn’t have a partner,” their teachers would say, and Taejung would soften, begrudgingly stomping over to where Chanyeol was standing alone, “he needs someone to practice with.”

His force is not fazed by Chanyeol’s flames.

They start pairing them up for their quarterly showcases, days where they perform onstage in front of a crowd of people from different sectors.

Always, there are cameras.

Always, there are charts.

Chanyeol’s letters are squiggly compared to Taejung’s, but their names are displayed in the bulletin boards anyway, at the top.

Mom is delighted: she says she’d been so worried about his friends: not if they were nice— _because who wouldn’t be nice to you?_ —but if they could handle him.

“An equal,” she says, “is the most important thing.”

And Chanyeol realizes it now.

He sees how his flames burn brighter than anybody else’s, knows that he is stronger, more powerful.

His charts are different, but with Taejung, they are the same, and in that space he can roam where he wants; let his fire stumble and chase and nip without worrying.

Mom officially meets him after a failed showcase.

Chanyeol couldn’t form the butterflies that were important to the story they’d been assigned to, and Taejung had only laughed when he’d seen tears prick at his eyes.

“Butterflies are no match for you,” Taejung had said, comforting him in the way only he could do, “you’ll perfect them in a week anyway.”

“You’re not going home yet?” Mom asks now, when Chanyeol is in her arms and the three of them are the only ones left in the small gymnasium.

“I think I’ll wait for hyung a little longer,” Taejung is sheepish, “but if he doesn’t come I can take the trains. He’s busy.”

Chanyeol knows his hyung is all he has.

“Nonsense,” Mom smiles, “me and Chanyeol are getting ice cream. Come.”

“I don’t have any money, it’s alright, really—“

Mom clicks her tongue, cutting him off. She starts pulling him along, and Taejung has no choice but to follow.

“It would be rude not to accept. What’s your favorite flavor?”

His friends grows even shyer. “Chocolate.”

“Very boring,” Mom smiles, voice softening. “Where we’re going, there’s lots more. You can choose better ones when we get there.”

It goes from ice cream parlors to out-of-school park playdates to sleepovers. 

Taejung is the damper to Mom’s worry—the literal rock, she says, to Chanyeol’s fire.

_Will Taejung be with you?_

_Why isn’t he your partner?_

_Can’t the both of you go together?_

She still brings him to other preschools at the start of the year, but Chanyeol feels her slip away from her dream of having him grow up amongst non-Regens.

“Your fire,” she says for the last time, “I think your fire might be bigger than mine, baby. If you want to leave the school, just tell me. It’ll be okay. We’ll start over and I could teach you instead and you’d never have to—“

“Taejung will miss me.”

Chanyeol is already walking away.

_—then is it because i am flawed?—_

_aren't we all?_

Chanyeol watches the flames bite at Taejung’s skin.

One beat, Taejung cries out. The next, he’s buckling, panic and fear blending in with his whimpers.

There’s nothing else Chanyeol can seem to do—his fire has already died out along with his breaths, but the pain on Taejung’s face is still there, still burning.

Chanyeol is ten years old.

Flashes come back to him, piece by piece—the crack in the door, the man in the white coat.

_Dangerous._

He knows now.

He cares.

He’d always believed otherwise; thought he could keep the possibility at bay through his smiles and jokes and laughter.

Danger looked like dark alley corners and edged smiles and suspicious intentions.

Not _accidents._ Not _playtime._ Not _practice._

There’s something squeezing at his chest, tightening when he thinks about how Taejung is supposed to be the farthest one when it came to the wrong side of his fire. 

There is a different kind of betrayal—the one unmeant, the one least expected.

“I’m sorry,” he tries. He hates himself, as if his loathing can keep Taejung from crying. As if it can turn back time. “I didn’t mean it, I swear.”

Taejung only nods. “I know you didn’t.”

The nurse halts the blob of liquid about to touch his shoulder. They’d delivered a few classmates to her station before, seen them scream from the sting.

“Hold my hand then, Dumbo.” 

The nickname has grown endearing, although quietly ironic in the moment—Taejung doesn’t let anyone else call Chanyeol that anymore.

He always says he’s the only one that’s earned the right to make fun of his ears. 

“I’m scared.”

Chanyeol does not cry out, not even when Taejung grips his fingers so tight they bruise violet the next day.

Chanyeol jostles his mother’s shoulder.

The other side of the bed is empty. 

His father is away again.

Mom never sleeps in the center, choosing to cram herself instead in the illusion of someone she wishes were there.

“Channie,” his mother mumbles, shaken. “What is it, baby?”

Taejung’s voice won’t let him sleep.

_I’m scared._

Mom had fire in her heart too. 

Maybe that was why she’d asked for forgiveness, back when Chanyeol had burned the grass at the park through his feet.

Maybe she’d seen this coming.

His teachers always described their powers as things to be wary of. They did not know where they’d come from, and they did not know who they fully answer to.

 _Not yet,_ they’d always say, pointing up to the buildings of researchers trying to form a better world for newer people. Just that they were vessels, just that they had to be careful.

The calluses on Mom’s fingers slide past Chanyeol’s knuckles. “Is there something wrong, Channie?”

Chanyeol remembers when his father had told him the story of how Mom loved to make fire _sing._

He painted a picture of an artist.

Graceful. Strong. Burning.

He clutches at a piece of her sweater.

Chanyeol hopes she understands.

“Teach me.”

Chanyeol doesn’t go to Taejung’s birthday party.

Mom sees him fidget at the doorway, grip on the paper bag tight.

Mom assures him that the gift will be delivered to the Roh residence instead—a small friendship bracelet made a few weeks before, grey and blue and black.

He’d asked Mom to help him with the patterns, staying up past his bedtime to finish braiding it so they’d wrap around Taejung’s wrist more than once. 

They’re the same ones that guide the ribbons of flame that Chanyeol summons in their small yard—over, under, up, down, curling and twisting in between the checkpoints Mom had set-up to help with his control—movements lulling until he saps up enough of his energy to go back inside.

She says he’s advancing faster than she expected.

She tries to convince him of accidents: how they happen when you don’t expect them to, to people you don’t want to hurt.

A strawberry yakult slides its way across his desk.

“It’s boring without you,” Taejung frowns. “What’s wrong?”

Chanyeol shakes his head. He takes the drink, spinning it around, hoping Taejung goes away. For some reason, the fact that it’s his favorite makes him even sadder.

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying,” Taejung tries in singsong, mimicking the tone of some viral moment in some idol interview. “Don’t lie, don’t lie.”

The other kids have been using it for days, and Chanyeol almost laughs—but his gaze falls to the bandages on Taejung’s shoulder.

They’re almost unnoticeable, barely a bump under his uniform.

Chanyeol sees it though.

He feels like he sees it too much.

“Does it still hurt?”

Taejung has that look in his eyes again—the one paired with a concentrated tilt of the head and fingers drumming against the nearest possible surface.

Chanyeol’s learned for it to mean that he’s studying someone: gaze roving over their arms and scrutinizing their faces. 

Taejung brings a chair over, settling in front of him.

It’s a whole hour before their next teacher comes in, and he usually spends it in the playgrounds with Taejung, but Chanyeol imagines those days gone.

“No," he says, flicking Chanyeol in the forehead. “Do you think I hate you?”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

Taejung does it harder, sharp enough to bring him back. 

“Ya!” Chanyeol whines, rubbing at the spot. “What’s your problem?”

“Stupid,” Taejung says. The syllables are awkward, stilted—his hyung doesn’t let him curse too much at home. “You really are a Dumbo.” 

Taejung’s smile is small, slight like him.

There rests an uneasiness: the hesitance in the slowness of his hands, the wary touch against his wrist instead of between his fingers.

But Taejung has always been complex: his eyes have never held contempt for Chanyeol, not even when he’s burned and weak and hurting because of him. 

“Come help me get the tablet. Jihoon’s been hogging it since this morning, and I want to watch Pororo.”

When Chanyeol still isn’t convinced, Taejung leans in, conspiratorial.

“She’ll give it to you if you smile,” he whispers, “she has a crush on you.” 

Chanyeol turns the shade of berries he’s named after. “She _does not_ —”

“I’ll tell on you!”

“Taejung, _ya!”_

_—then shall i go? i have traveled far, but if you do not wish for me to be your soulmate, then there is not much i can do.—_

_stay a while. tell me of your travels._

Chanyeol is grateful.

Taejung is the one that studies his fire well enough to click his tongue at the slightest bit of Chanyeol’s apprehension at the newer techniques. 

He edges him on when his maneuvers are slipping.

Because they’re doing those now—Chanyeol is eleven years old, thrust into the second part of the program. The teachers say there are three, scheduled to finish before they properly start going into the schools that are equipped for Regens.

Taejung doesn’t look at Chanyeol with wariness when he tops the performance exams—only smiles and catches up, making sure to have his name not two paces below Chanyeol’s.

He shouts at him to hurry because they’re going to run out of yakult from the vending machine. 

He surprises him with his hyung’s special kimbap during lunch.

They grow together for another year, closer and closer until Chanyeol is telling him about how he’s worried for his father’s missions and his mother’s frail heart.

He’s nervous for their upcoming stage.

“You’re silly,” Taejung laughs, “you’ll do okay. You have to. Hyung will come, and I can’t have a bad performance the only time he does.”

Chanyeol is grateful for that too—for the vague older brother that Chanyeol only really knows through brief visits and mentions, the one that teaches Kyungsoo the same way Mom has been teaching Chanyeol.

“They’ll be too distracted by you to notice if I slip up anyway,” Chaneyol considers. “Your bit’s too pretty to look away from.” 

They work with the story of a fire fox, gone to look for a tiara made of moonlight. 

The stones are shipped from Jeju, violet black crystals that Taejung has to control to match Chanyeol’s ribbons of flame—his control is untouchable.

He’s the best in the sector, and coupled with Chanyeol’s power, they find themselves bonding more in bus seats and train stations than anywhere else; gone to travel for special showcases.

An older teacher says they work so well together because they’re such good friends.

She says that their powers are as much a part of them as they are a part of nature.

 _No,_ Chanyeol corrects, _he’s my_ best _friend._

He does it with everyone, to all their classmates that think they’re only doing it for the standing and the adults that want Chanyeol to spend more time with their children.

He doesn’t know why he doesn’t say it out loud to Taejung.

Their bond is close enough to lapse into the space of unspoken things, and Chanyeol always just assumes Taejung knows.

Chanyeol should have told him. 

— _will it change anything? if i stay?—_

_no. but the moon is bright and beautiful, and you are already here. it would be a shame for you to go._

Taejung is leaving.

Chanyeol is trying to drudge up any memory of his warning—any memory of him pulling Chanyeol aside and preparing him for the thick fear settling down his gut.

This fear is different.

Not sharp, not thin, not _cutting._

This fear is slow, _thick_ , soft like his padded coats and cotton candy, fueled by the possibility of losing the one person he’d always thought would stay by his side no matter what.

He only has a layer of disbelief for protection. Taejung wouldn’t leave him alone. He couldn’t possibly.

It was the first thing Taejung knew about him—

— _please don’t leave me alone—_

Taejung and his hyung will come with them over to Daegu.

They’ll laugh and smile about how easily superior their performance had been—how Taejung and Chanyeol’s elements blended their conduits perfectly in the air.

They’ll ride an Airtrav on the way because Taejung had always wanted to ride on one, and Dad will finally, properly, meet the friend that loved to run through the playgrounds with him.

“Taejung!”

Chanyeol spots him getting into a car. There’s a penguin plushie in his arms.

“Taejung!” he shouts again. “Where are you going? Aren’t you coming with us?”

Taejung’s foot is already poised to climb into the backseat. Making a decision, he runs up to Chanyeol and knocks the breath from his lungs.

His hug is tight, voice trembling and wavery.

“I’m sorry,” he says, always knowing what Chanyeol needs to hear, “me and hyung have to go away for a while.”

It’s not enough.

“You never said anything—“

“I’m sorry I couldn’t.” Taejung is already slipping away, like a shadow Chanyeol can’t run after. “You’d have cried. You look ugly when you cry, Chanyeol.”

This is the only time Chanyeol hates him.

“I’ll see you again,” Taejung whispers, “I promise.”

One second, he’s crushing Chanyeol in his arms, and the next, he’s gone—manifesting into the rev of an old engine and the slam of the car door.

Mom isn’t fast enough. 

Mom fails to shut the door properly, fails to sense Chanyeol peeking through the sliver of light spilling from the room.

 _Does he have any other relatives?_ the woman asks. _Might you know another contact? We could just void out his records, but it would be a shame, he was so brilliant—_

“Did something happen?”

The two women turn sharply.

Chanyeol is old enough to recognize the look of Mom’s face.

It’s the same one that appears when his father comes home limping and when Chanyeol forgets to hide his powers in the non-Regen parts of the sector.

Dread.

The woman in the white coat isn’t fast enough either _—_ Chanyeol’s eyes fall to the projection from the tablet.

The same car that Taejung climbed into has sunk, top half-peeking out of a ravine. The letters say Busan. The letters say they didn’t survive. They say there aren’t even bodies to bury.

“Baby,” Mom takes him into her arms. “Baby, I’m so sorry.”

Chanyeol didn’t even get to say goodbye.

_—would you miss me? if I left?—_

_no._

_you have stayed a short while, and time is not kind to the parts of the past that have no tether to the present._

For the first few months, Chanyeol refuses to believe.

He doesn’t say it, because Mom is as worried about him as it is, but he keeps an eye out for student registries. He pores through newspapers at night, flashlight in his hand, hounds websites on his tablet.

For the first few months, Chanyeol is hopeful.

And then he loses the bracelet.

The one remembrance he had—when Taejung had gifted him a friendship bracelet back, yellow and orange and red to symbolize his fire— _gone._

He’s frantic, frenzied search kicking up dust when he holds on to a thin hope that it might have gotten mixed in with the boxes in the attic. 

There are no pictures—Taejung greatly disliked taking them, and Mom had stopped trying after he’d gotten scared when she secretly took one while he was laughing with Chanyeol. 

There are no material gifts either: Taejung had always promised favors for Chanyeol’s birthdays.

Chanyeol has nothing else to hold onto now but his memories.

When Mom finally has him venture into the heart of Busan, because life stops for no one, he is thrust into a harsher world—a kaleidoscope of heavy gazes and careful approximations and bi-monthly assessments.

He fills up his own charts now, obsesses over them.

He is taught how to push his boundaries and translate history books, how to heat up his hands and read Mandarin.

There are pretty girls and even prettier boys, strong drinks under neon lights and maneuvers that pull out the most of his flame into the air, red-hot tongues of fire that melt steel in seconds.

Mom bids him goodbye on what will be her last mission.

It turns out that she was much more like his missing father than she’d let on.

“I have to find him,” she says, when Chanyeol is seventeen and lost and confused about everything.

His father had said back then, of how soulmates could feel each other in their hearts.

He’d read Chanyeol’s picturebook aloud—

—the story of the two foxes—

—how they could get tucked so neatly into each other that the lines blurred on where one started and where one ended, and the very same fate that brought them together couldn’t tell them apart.

Maybe, Chanyeol thinks as his aunt gives him the news, maybe that’s what happened.

Maybe one of them had gone, it was said that Mom did it first—maybe one of them had gone and took too much of Dad’s heart with her.

Official reports of their deaths breaks him into pieces, and from there is another flurry for survival.

He moves into his Aunt Kira’s house in Incheon. He adjusts to the new complexes, learns to live with fire in his breath and the promise to be good and kind and loving weighing at his steps.

Dad had made him promise to look after Mom.

Mom had made him promise to look after himself.

He hates them both for a while, and it is only then that Taejung is remembered again: he remembers how he did this to Chanyeol too—he remembers how his parents weren’t his first heartbreak.

Chanyeol walks through SM broken.

Angry. 

He drowns himself in studying enemy patterns and spyware coding. New languages take to his tongue, and he learns of the oceans and mountains his father had spoken over his bed long ago.

He is called _Experiment 61—_ the first of nine others.

There will always be a part of you the world cannot touch, and this will stay in Chanyeol no matter what: Dad’s first lesson, mastered to a knife-point even before he started training—

To read a book, you must first learn how to read characters. _Letters._ Fixed lines and dashes that unravel thoughts and messages and words.

To read a person, you must first learn how to read their tells _—_ their ambitions and agencies, their tics and the things they choose to hide.

For this ability, he is thrust even higher.

Chanyeol is sent to deal with royalty and diplomats and governors, quickly rising for his talent in making people trust him.

Chanyeol will tell the other operatives that it takes only a well-placed smile. A joke told in defense. A subtle touch to the arm.

They will not believe him, and Chanyeol will shrug and face the fact that another crucial part of him is turned into another weapon.

Chanyeol finds Jongin and Sehun.

He doesn’t know what force the universe operates on. He’s long given up trying to find out, but he remembers his promise and loves them as much as he is able.

He goes back to his aunt’s place whenever he can, buys a guitar and a keyboard so the music lessons Mom made him do won’t go to waste.

Slowly but surely, Taejung slips away. 

He is unnoticed; fading into gleaming black jewels first, and then laughter echoing in the hallways, and then races to the vending machine, and then guilt-ridden trips to the nurse’s office.

One day, he disappears from Chanyeol completely, irretrievable.

Chanyeol can’t even bring himself to be upset over what is only a name now, a vague feeling of safety and freedom clinging to the last vestiges of the syllables.

Chanyeol has had so many best friends since, and he remembers Taejung with wistfulness—convinces himself that it’s enough. 

He feels a part of Mom and Dad go with him.

The dead, after all, can only cling to you for so long. 

_—you would not remember me?—_

_the past is cluttered enough as it is._

_—i am your soulmate.—_

_and what good does that do to me?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> have some exposition


	2. Chapter 2

The first time Sehun says the Motherheart is stolen, Chanyeol doesn’t believe it.

He laughs in his face, even with a knife settled across his neck.

The Motherheart, sole vessel to SM’s passcodes, is too secure. There’s no way anyone could get away with it; Chanyeol designed some of the guard’s systems around it himself.

But everything comes to Chanyeol slower than he would like. The knife is shaking. Sehun presses his knee deeper into his chest.

He hears his cabinets being upended. That’s the sound of his glass shelves crashing to the ground.

“I didn’t—“

“I know you didn’t,” Sehun clamps a hand over Chanyeol’s mouth. “But they’re searching everywhere—they’re coming—stay still.”

Someone kicks his door down. 

Chanyeol squints as his bedroom is bathed in bright, nauseating red, triggering some memory in him, a ghost of desperation wrapped in molten wires and a necklace.

“I’ve got him,” Sehun calls out. “All clear.”

Chanyeol fights through the indignation rising up in his gut as men in gear rifle through every nook and corner they can find.

His books are split open. His picture frames are dismantled. Condoms are thrown out of the nightstand, along with a bottle of lube, and Chanyeol has modesty too well-trained out of his system to be embarrassed.

When they go through another ten minutes of destroying the only space he’d found enough comfort to be vulnerable in, they settle on him, pushing Sehun away.

Chanyeol raises an eyebrow when one of them pats against his bare torso—“are you expecting to find it on my abs?”—but the answer is lost when Chanyeol outright growls as palms reach his bracelet.

The Motherheart was something that could shift; change form as part of its defense system, but in the end it was just a piece of plastic and metal.

“Don’t touch that,” he snaps, “I’ll melt your bones off, I swear to god.”

The bracelet is the one of the few constants Chanyeol has allowed himself to have: metal stuttering in a soundwave pattern across his wrist, the two ends connected by reinforced silver.

It’ll be a cold day in hell before it touches anything related to SM.

“If it were the Motherheart,” Chanyeol grits out, “your sensors would’ve gone off before you came into the room.” 

The man only sends him an unimpressed look, quickly replaced with fear when Chanyeol’s eyes flash for a split-second—but the warning goes unheeded.

“Experiment 61,” they say. It’s another minute before they completely give up searching. “You’re expected in an hour.”

“What for?”

“The Motherheart is gone. What else for?”

_you have yet to tell me of your travels._

— _i do not have much tales to tell._ _—_

_not even one?_

_you smell like silk and spices._

_—a merchant.—_

_—he took me along for companionship.—_

_surely, you have seen things that might keep us warm._

_—which would you like?—_

_—entertainment, or truth?—_

Chanyeol has a talent for disbelief.

He holds on to suspension of truth, no matter how fleeting, uses ignorance as a cushion against the heavy blow of reality.

He makes sure lying does not come naturally to him: never has, never will, but the language of lies twists itself on his tongue when he isn’t looking sometimes, almost a habit. 

Like when he’s speeding through the streets in his Triumph, swerving to squeeze through traffic.

Like much later, when his boots are clicking against SM’s sterile marble floors.

Like now, when Sehun is beside him and the lights of the mini amphitheater project each and every agent’s identity for all active operatives to see.

The lie is dismantled by the shock on agents’ faces. It's their profiles, flashing in a continuous stream on the boards above their heads.

“Holy shit,” Sehun breathes beside him. “They’re rounding up the inactive ones too.”

1 through 60.

Current living location. Weight. Height. Blood type.

Missions completed, missions failed.

This is the first time Chanyeol’s ever seen a stunt like this.

While keeping secrets from your company was a danger most avoided, SM turns it around by having the agents specialize in espionage and much of the low-level missions.

Agents, for this reason, are multipurpose.

Experimentals like Chanyeol are not—streamlined for expertise, grouped into training programs early on and commissioned because they were the best at getting a type of job done.

The side across from them is solemn, rows of black coats on rows of shoulders, brooches glinting gold in black-and-white pictures.

A parallel lies in Chanyeol’s hand: a set of rings, containing the identification code for clearance where it’s needed.

Between the 100 operatives contracted under SM, there is only one number that stays dark.

_i suppose i would prefer the truth, starting with why a merchant would choose you for companionship._

_have they not dogs?_

— _i have very pretty fur, you see.—_

_already, you lie._

_—hush.—_

They say the Motherheart will be every operative’s secondary priority, which Chanyeol only takes as _someone else will be handling this._

It makes sense to him: an agent for an agent.

But he’s here, inside the director’s main office, full blast of the aircon not able to match the cold dread spreading through his fingers.

Twenty minutes after the debriefing ended, guards had taken his arms, taking him directly upstairs and locking all exits.

He was ready to defend himself.

But the director is spouting things Chanyeol had already guessed on the way there.

SM was breached, SM was panicking, and it was, above all—

“Desperate.”

Chanyeol stares at the case file on the table.

“Your words sir,” he says, cautious, “not mine.”

“Do you know what they say about you?”

“Loud,” Chanyeol mutters, skimming his fingers over the paperboard. He doesn’t know if he wants to accept this assignment just yet. “Rude. Weak.”

“Lucky,” the director adds. “Undeserving.”

His name plaque sits glinting on a separate stand.

_Lee Sangtae._

“And yet you have a success rate of 89 percent,” Sangtae snatches the folder from under his hands, wagging it in the air like some treat he expects Chanyeol to want. “A testament to your training.”

Chanyeol’s program was intended to hone experiments for distraction and manipulation. Being underestimated is a part of it—the words they call him are no more for the desperate clients than the operatives who know what he’s capable of.

“When they underestimate you,” Chanyeol recites, the mantra drilled into his head, “they give you permission to take them down.”

The director gives the folder back. “What was the first thing they ever taught you?”

Chanyeol frowns. “Know the rules by heart.”

“The second?”

“Break them.”

“The third?”

“Never break them the same way twice.”

“Program 0112. Consistent Unpredictability,” Lee Sangtae says, tapping his pen against the table.

“They said it wouldn’t work. People would catch on. The illusion would disappear. They would know to never underestimate any one of you, but it was never about the long run.”

Chanyeol remembers them starting out as ten.

Experimental operatives were already known for being last resorts; their expertise perfect for assignments that took on levels of danger that were too high for most of their agents, but it was said that Program 0112 was special—and those that survived it even more so.

Operatives like Chanyeol didn’t last long, in one sense of the phrase or another.

Each one had a final mission: one that would end your contract or your life, depending on who you were.

“All of you were meant to be dealt sparingly,” Sangtae says now, “only let go via black-label commissions. All of you were too good to be left with access to SM’s resources.”

He flicks his eyes over to Chanyeol.

“You’re the only one left.”

For only a few seconds, the information refuses to sink in, but when it does, the words hit him with the force of a train wreck.

He barely remembers their names, but he remembers believing that they were just as bound as he was—just as caged—and there was a comfort in knowing he at least had allies.

“Could I,” he says, voice delicate, “could I ask how many survived, sir?”

“All of them.” Lee Sangtae leans back in his seat, steepling his hands on his chest. “Why haven’t you opened the assignment, 61?”

Chanyeol curls his fist, nails digging into his palm.

He makes a mental note to look through the database to check if they weren’t hunted, and then he forces himself to have the fire simmering on his fingertips to die down.

“Level S operatives are given the choice—“

“You’ve never done it before.”

It’s common knowledge for meetings like this to be designed to destabilize an agent—easier to get them to do what the company wanted—but he still wonders if he might be able to make his hand bleed.

“There’s a first time for everything,” Chanyeol replies, “sir.”

He knows what the file contains.

Only one number stayed dull and hidden in the boards. Only one agent was absent on a compulsory emergency meeting.

“You’ve run out of assignments to turn down, I’m afraid.”

Sangtae takes out a knife from his drawers.

“This will serve as your severance operation.”

“Sir?”

“You’re the top of your program,” the director stares, a challenge in his tone, “or you would be, no?”

“Would be,” Chanyeol swallows his irritation again, _calm down,_ “yes sir.”

All those years, his name had been at the top, but it would always be faded, pixels grayer than the ones below: a sign that his missions were incomplete.

“And why are you only a would-be, 61?”

“I—“ Chanyeol shuts his mouth, stopping the words. _I refuse to follow blindly._ “I don’t know, sir.”

Lee Sangtae laughs in his face. “You’re a would-be because you refuse to terminate your targets.”

There’s a small black box; metal edges gleaming in the shine of the overhead lights. 

“Because you leave them injured instead of dead. Because you let them escape, even when your simulation results disprove your excuses.”

Chanyeol watches as he slashes the flesh of his forearm, the blood trickling down his elbow. Each possible drop lands on the box’s surface, absorbed within a second.

“That is the consistency you’ve been allowed to have,” he says, binding the contract, “the only operative the agency tolerates as much as possible.”

Chanyeol knows he’d been silently rebelling for years now, even if it wasn’t in the way that mattered.

When they stopped questioning him but kept giving him missions, he’d assumed the cases were deemed acceptable, and he could move on to the others.

“The agency expected to let you go after 5 years, as per your contract. But you kept surviving the black-ops we were sending you, and you accepted our new offers. The board agreed to save you for something critical.”

Next comes a pill, hastily swallowed.

“These are very critical times,” Sangtae nods towards the folder. “Open it.”

Chanyeol takes a deep breath in, staring at the paperboard.

Agent 12, however secretive, was known for being one of the best SM had under its name.

He’s the one agent Chanyeol couldn’t get ahead of, why he was always almost the best.

Any attempt at a conflict with him would end messy— _critical,_ Sangtae had said, but he might’ve just as well said _impossible._

_Fatal._

But Chanyeol is out of choices. He was out of _easy_ the moment he passed his training program.

He finally flips through the portfolio.

90% success rate.

101 missions complete, all transcribed in shorthand.

3 failed—one of which was his most recent, presumed only so because while the evidence of success was there, he’d failed to turn in a report for it.

He goes to the final page, expecting a face and stats. He finds nothing.

“Agent 12 was a Level S operative before deserting,” Sangtae explains. “Whatever information we have, he’s wiped clean. We can’t even retrieve footage.” 

No aliases.

No codes, no known allies.

Nothing.

“I’ll find him,” Chanyeol mutters, already going back to see his latest assignments, calculating the possible routes for information.

The level of thoroughness was expected, but everyone had a thread.

Everyone had connections.

The sparse data they do have on him are almost useless: he was born barely a month after Chanyeol. 152 to 174 cm. Features unknown. Current base unknown. Most recent activity dated five years ago.

“You have three months,” the director says, and it snaps him out of it. “Retrieve the Motherheart, and surrender Agent 12 to SM.” 

“Sir?”

“You’re the only one we can trust to bring him back alive.”

Three months to hunt a shadow.

Three months to scramble for an identity.

Three months to bring back a person that was, in essence, trained to be as nonexistent as possible.

“I don’t even know his name,” Chanyeol protests. Even the best needed time. “Barely know what he looks like. His acquaintances are two agents that haven’t been seen for years.”

“You will have unrestricted access to all our resources.”

“It’s still not enough,” Chanyeol _tsk_ s, “maybe extra time to gather as much information as I can—“

“Five people have taken the same pill as I did.”

The threat hangs in the air, cutting Chanyeol off. 

Holding lives hostage was only done by officials—heads of the company that had a whole brigade to hunt you down lest you fail.

Sangtae was supposed to be Chanyeol’s.

One should be enough. 

But _five_ —no doubt innocent, five lives depending on an agent too caught up in his own world to consider what his stupid stunt might mean for others.

Five to play collateral damage.

He feels it. _H_ _elplessness,_ bubbling up in his throat. It’s too familiar, ingrained into his very soul, years of being trapped and stuck into an impossible corner.

“I’m sure you know what’ll happen,” the director tucks the box away, back into the drawer. 

There’s a spark, rapid and loud and _burning_ , trying to make it past his self-control. It wants to set the whole building on fire.

“You’re the best card we have,” Sangtae stands, making way for the door. “You have until next weekend to finalize the papers for commencement and approval.”

Chanyeol hears the words he doesn’t say.

_You have no choice._

Lee Sangtae sees the defeat shining in Chanyeol’s eyes. 

He snorts like his final bid of humanity—the refusal to let people die on his account—was a joke, a cute ideology one of his own was too stupid to have. 

Maybe, Chanyeol thinks, maybe he’s right.

Chanyeol mutters assent, but he doesn’t know what he’s saying, not really.

“Good dog,” Sangtae claps.

The office doors reopen. Outside is Sehun, looking like he’d run a marathon, two guards on either side. 

“I’ll make it four, because the agency likes you. Give you a month for info retrieval.”

“Thank you sir.” 

Chanyeol ducks his head again, eyes flashing a threatening gold.

Before Lee Sangtae walks out of the room, he stops at the door. One hand already has his phone poised on his ear, the call already ringing. 

“One way or another,” he says, uttering the words that will haunt Chanyeol for the next few weeks, “you will be the final failure of Program 0112.”

_fur is no reason to take a fox along._

_—the merchant stole me from my master, bought me in chains.—_

_— i had no choice.—_

_why did you have a master at all?_

_—i was only a kit when he found me.—_

_did you not escape?_

_we are wild creatures._

_—it is hard to go against what you have always known.—_

The sky is violent tonight. Thunder claps behind clumps of cumulonimbus, lightning illuminating the rain beating down in torrents down the streets.

As he walks the road leading to his apartment, Chanyeol breathes in the cold making its way past his layers. 

After the first official month given to him for info-retrieval, he’d only come up with traces to Miocom.

It’s becoming apparent what Agent 12’s motives had been, but even those are shrouded with mystery: there have been spoof articles, fake cctv footage, and false accounts on the internet.

More than the idea of five innocent lives dying for his failure, it's the itch of being free from SM that's starting to grate through his ears. 

He’s rounding the bend when he sees it.

A figure, buckling behind the back of the restaurant. The neon lights above are reflected on its jacket, hair sticking to its nape.

Chanyeol doesn’t know why he runs, but he does.

It’s a man.

There’s a red puddle around him, matching the slowly growing spot of pink on his shirt. There’s a knife by his side, blood already cleaned away by the storm.

Chanyeol feels a sense of urgency, pure and bright, as he kneels to press two fingers on his neck.

This man isn’t central to a scheme.

This man won’t give him anything in return.

It’s one he hasn’t felt without ulterior motives in a long time, and if anything, Chanyeol is grateful he’s still got it in him.

He’d have time if he was a civilian—more if he were a Regen—the wound is shallow, probably not requiring much more than a few stitches.

It’s the cold, Chanyeol realizes, that’s killing him. Even now, his pulse is faint, wrist thudding against Chanyeol’s, freezing.

Maybe it was out of the goodness of his heart.

Maybe it was bid to feel like he had some semblance of control in the grand scheme of the universe.

Maybe it was because the man had a badge from Miocom cleverly hidden as a cufflink on his sleeve, and if Chanyeol connected enough dots then he could use this as a lead.

It could be all those things; because if there’s one thing Chanyeol knows from picking people apart, it’s that most of everyone’s decisions are never simple.

Park Chanyeol sees Do Kyungsoo—unmoving, pale, chest stuttering weakly—and decides that even if he had the order of saving five lives stuck in a self-righteous noose around his throat, he’d at least make it his own choice to save this one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shall we start?


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> jongin’s fit is from the mmmh mv—the one he uses when he’s sitting on top a building (or a skyscraper idk). 
> 
> the mv was so cool and like,,, the perfect set-up for a futuristic anything. the “Jumper” jongin here is mmmh kai jsncjdm

“He’s pretty,” Jongin hums, steps clicking across the floor. “Imagine poisoning a face like that. You sure it worked?” 

The Jumper is in his usual gear: a red and white coat, military boots to go with his cargo pants. He’d been finishing off his deliveries before Chanyeol had called him.

“I’m sure it’s Poforgen,” Chanyeol nods. “He’ll wake up soon. Just need to make sure he doesn’t kill anyone the moment he does.”

“He tried to kill you?” Jongin asks, brows raising. “Must’ve been a close thing, if you’re still this stuck-up on it.”

“It was _not_ close,” Chanyeol mutters. “Held a knife to my throat and flipped me around a bit until he fell on top of me. He couldn’t have killed me even if he wanted to.”

The man had relapsed past lunch—waking a bit, mumbling nonsense before slipping back into unconsciousness—and well into the afternoon.

The living room is bathed in the colors of the sunset, slight pink leaking in through Chanyeol’s high windows, clouds outside tinged with red and gold.

The sole reason he’d bought this particular apartment is lost to him; Chanyeol is resting his head on the kitchen counter, running his hand along a throw pillow.

“Fell on top of you? I see,” Jongin says suggestively, leaning in to trace the man’s shoulder.

“And you sleep half-naked, right? What did I say about fucking pretty homeless people, hyung?”

Jongin only laughs at the bottle of Diforeon Chanyeol throws his way.

He’d tried to pay Jongin for it. The antidote was rare, on the account of a Regen being poisoned being even rarer, but Jongin had only scoffed in his face and wouldn’t accept any amount Chanyeol tried to give.

“That would’ve hit his jawline,” Jongin scolds, catching it, “you almost committed a sin.”

“Take this seriously,” Chanyeol mumbles.

The man’s belongings, however sparse, are spread out on the tabletop: his jacket, his shoes, his pants. There is no wallet, no ID, no form of confirmation. Chanyeol had done a face-search: there are no records of him throughout the city.

The most he’d had was footage taken in _Daegu_ , a whole fifteen sectors away from Seoul, black coat in his hand as he stepped out of the subway and walked to an old café.

“What else is there to figure out?” Jongin plops down on the chair beside the couch. “He’s obviously one of yours.”

“One of _ours_.”

“Don’t include me,” Jongin waves off, “I’m a freelancer.”

Jumpers were few in Seoul, usually found in the fields of research and spatial studies—designing buildings, innovating new ways of living—edge gained through their uncanny talent for calculations.

It was rare for a Jumper to weaponize their skills like Jongin did.

“You have a contract,” Chanyeol reminds him. “With SM, like the rest of us.”

“Will you take him in?”

Before Chanyeol can answer, his suspicions are confirmed. Jongin’s muffled scream has his seat skittering back.

The man has his fingers around Jongin’s throat, holding him up and steady, feet lifted an inch from the floor. 

“Let him go,” Chanyeol summons stick-thin blades of fire in a ring around the man’s head. “ _Now,_ or I spear them through your neck.”

“Not if I break his first,” the man snarls. “What did you do to me?”

“Do you not understand Korean?” Chanyeol pulls his flame up, up, up. _“Let him go.”_

“Why don’t you just make your Jumper friend teleport?”

Jongin’s eyes are panicked, fingers clenching and unclenching at his sides—Chanyeol knows that he’d Jumped under even worse conditions, and the simple answer has alarm coursing through his veins.

He can’t breathe. 

“That’s right.” The man’s eyes are dark. “I can crush his lungs faster than your stupid little blades can pierce through my fields.”

Chanyeol feels them. There are walls of hard air surrounding the man’s skin, maybe even impenetrable.

“Start talking.”

Much of being the best was knowing where you stood. To know when to yield, and when to pull back—to know when fighting would make things worse.

“We helped you,” Chanyeol rushes, keeping his gaze on Jongin, “I found you bleeding out on an alley and brought you to my apartment and made you sleep on my fucking couch and now you’re killing the same goddamn person that saved you from being posioned.”

Everything else lay in the opponent: whether they were open to trade, or had to be put down.

_“Let him go.”_

An agonizing second passes before Jongin drops to the ground, buckling to the rug, hand flying to his throat. 

_Trade._

“Kyungsoo,” Chanyeol tries, watching the man’s eyes go wide. 

_True._

Something clutches at his throat, invisible hands ghosting along his skin.

When Chanyeol questioned him for a name as he was flitting in and out of consciousness, he’d thought he was just muttering anything he could come up with. 

_Dangerously true._

Tighter and tighter.

Chanyeol hadn’t had contact with a force-wielder in a long time.

“Funny,” Chanyeol sends a burst of heat outwards, crawling from the floor and through the man's feet. “The things people say when they’re high on medication. Is Baekhyun a close friend?”

He wanted to play god.

Chanyeol would indulge him.

The hands on his throat are tight, but Chanyeol’s flame will kill him faster than lack of air ever could, and the way the man’s throat bobs—he knows it.

It’s an impressive thirty seconds before the man lets go with a dirty look, crumpling to his knees.

Chanyeol calls his fire back in a rush, and they watch the man try to look composed with sweat drenching his shirt. The sudden lack of heat would throw him off even more.

“We haven’t even done anything yet,” Jongin whines. “Why are you like this?”

“First of all,” the man—Kyungsoo—points out, “if you expect someone to be nice and grateful in _Seoul_ , then that’s on you.”

Kyungsoo clutches at the couch, trying to regain his bearings. “I wake up after being stabbed in a stranger’s apartment, wearing a stranger’s clothes, with my things on some stranger’s table.”

His glare is almost impressive.

“And then I wake up to some idiot in Jumper-gear standing over me.”

Jongin shrinks. Chanyeol doesn’t know where he gets the audacity to pout at a time like this. 

“I’m trapped, I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know what kind of shit you’ve put into my body,” he says, “and you ask me _why are you like this?_ ”

“I forgot how mean you guys can be,” Jongin mutters beside him, but Chanyeol isn’t listening. There’s a tick going off in his head.

_I’m trapped._

“You can sense the blockers?”

Kyungsoo’s breaths are heavy as he leans back on the couch. “Who wouldn’t?”

“Everybody else.”

He’d had the blockers installed when he moved in: so subtle that only those with special training specifically dedicated to espionage missions could sense them.

He couldn’t blame Kyungsoo for a slip like that. He almost died of overheating a few seconds ago.

But a snare is a snare.

Kyungsoo seems to realize it when Chanyeol settles in front of him, smile edged.

“You tried to kill me,” Kyungsoo defends. Already, his face is masked, mouth set in a thin line. 

“Something you’ve done twice since waking up.”

The air _buzzes._

Chanyeol would have expected his power to drown out anyone else’s _—_ it always did before—but now, there’s something mixing with his flame.

“Personally,” Chanyeol says, “I prefer introductions first.”

_—the merchant cured my master's daughter.—_

_—as payment, he demanded me, all because his child fancied my bushy tail.—_

_and did your master fight for you?_

_—no.—_

_then i am sorry._

Incheon is precisely 234 kilometers away from Seoul.

The technological heart of New Korea is eight hours by motorbike, seven by the Han-Sil Line. 

Its sidewalks take the local buses twelve hours to reach, and the Airtrav routes will grace its massive skyline in six. 

Jumper systems take only four.

Chanyeol swerves between traffic, the knot between his shoulders tightening with fatigue by the minute.

Even at two in the morning, the Anyang highway is packed, trucks on their way to do deliveries and tourists come to get a head-start for winter in Seoul. 

It’s another hour before he reaches Busan. The constant red bumper lights flooding his vision do nothing to stave off his annoyance. 

Jongin isn’t helping either. 

_“Bet my offer’s looking pretty good right now,”_ his voice floats inside the space of Chanyeol’s helmet, _“I don’t know why you turned it down in the first place.”_

“Nobody could pay Jumpers to keep a secret,” Chanyeol barely manages to fit between two buses, “you know that. And I can’t risk Sehun coming after me.”

_“Is he really the only lead you can go after?”_

“He’s not even a lead,” Chanyeol mumbles.

He wouldn’t be going after Kyungsoo if he had any other choice.

The man had told him the barest of details and not much more: he worked for Miocom, his full name was Do Kyungsoo, and that he needed to go back as soon as possible—all of which barely constituted a decent reason to tail him for a straight day on his motorbike. 

He’d been too stagnant though, already running out of time. 

Even ghosts had to start out _somewhere_ , but no matter how much Chanyeol tried, Agent 12 stubbornly remained nonexistent outside of the possible links to Miocom.

“But he’s all I have.”

He veers a sharp left, getting off the main road. It’s almost pathetic how desperate he’d gotten. 

He’s surrounded by Anyang’s famous evergreen reserves: winter is coming, and the smell of pine and cold surround him from all sides. 

The click of Jongin’s tongue is lost in the revving of the engine. Chanyeol brings his visor up, relishing the sharp sting of wind on his face as he speeds down a now-empty freeway.

_“What do you need him for?”_

“I told you,” Chanyeol has to shout to get Jongin to hear him. “He works for Miocom.”

His bike has always ever been for the thrill of speeding down motorways on two wheels, but now—the incessant growl thrumming from the pads of his feet is an anchor; the weight of the handlebars giving something for him to focus on other than exhaustion.

 _“I don’t hear about them too much_.”

“They have this agreement.” 

Chanyeol remembers the day they signed it clearly—delivering the terms was one of his first missions as a full operative. 

“Jobs Northwest go to SM, Miocom gets everything Southeast. Government’s in on it, and it’s been real quiet ever since. Better than when they’d turn streets into playgrounds, you know?”

_“They’d steal the Motherheart?”_

“They’re the only ones that can get away with it,” Chanyeol slows down to round a bend, “and there’s been an influx of Miocom operatives up North for the past two years. No pattern, but that’s to be expected.”

_“That’s a lot of guesswork.”_

“Don’t tell Sehun I’m gone,” Chanyeol says, instead of refuting it. Mainly because he can’t. “And for the last time, stop calling me _._ ”

 _“I’ll call again,”_ Jongin scolds. _“You need someone to worry about you, hyung. Don’t die.”_

The click of the line is the last thing Chanyeol processes before something catches at his wheels, and he’s sent flying onto the street.

Chanyeol waits.

His breath is still knocked from his lungs, and the fight to get his fingers to stop shaking is longer than he’s used to.

His Bonneville is standing untouched.

Fire coats his hand, a steady throb of pain radiating from where he’d landed. Something had caught Chanyeol midair, slowing his fall, softening the blow of raw pavement slamming on his hips.

With every exhale, light: orange tongues cutting through the darkness, snaking through the space around him. 

And then comes a wall, flashing behind his bike.

It does this in beats, steadily growing taller with each one—Chanyeol realizes that there’s another wall behind him, buzzing with power that he’s not eager to touch. 

Chanyeol can practically taste the sheer _force_ pulsing on his tongue, thick and sharp and metallic.

“I thought we agreed to end it with a goodbye,” Kyungsoo calls out, wall parting around him. He comes closer, boots clicking beneath the asphalt. “And that if I ever saw you again, I’d kill you.”

His leather jacket hugs his shoulders, hair windblown. His dark eyes are framed by angry brows, lips set into a thin line.

“You saw me lots of times before this one,” Chanyeol finally finds his voice. “You watched me follow you.”

He lets himself stand up on weak legs, level with the weapon now being shoved in his face.

“Seemed like you gave as much fucks about that goodbye as I did.”

This is the first time Chanyeol’s stared down the barrel of a gun with calm eyes. There is no quickening in his blood, none of his flame surging up to defend him.

Central to Chanyeol’s program is the skill to analyze. To take apart a person tic by tic, truth by truth. To know what they’re capable of before the targets realize it themselves.

There is only one thing Chanyeol is sure of when it comes to Do Kyungsoo, formed through nights of poring over each and every one of his actions the day he’d threatened Jongin.

He can’t kill.

He’s sure of it. 

Even now, his fingers shake on the metal, though minute, little nervous tremors in the force mingling with Chanyeol’s fire. 

“Take off the safety,” Chanyeol reminds him, “or is this another show?”

“You think this is a game,” Kyungsoo grits out. His gaze is as heavy as the finger pushing down on the mechanism; as loaded as the gun. “You must be a different breed of stupid.”

“Do it then,” Chanyeol challenges. “Kill me.”

Kyungsoo’s fingers don’t stop trembling.

His eyes remain unchanged.

There is no warning.

Not a second after the words leave Chanyeol’s mouth, Kyungsoo pulls the trigger.

_—do not be sorry.—_

_—the betrayal turned out well.—_

_did you bite the hand that fed you?_

_—when he brought me to chest for the last time, i tore his neck.—_

Chanyeol wonders if things could have been different.

If he could have been sure of two things about Do Kyungsoo instead of one—if he’d seen that he could injure instead of being smug about knowing he couldn’t kill.

Chanyeol had been shot at before.

He knows the bite of metal digging itself into flesh, knows the specific _crack_ different guns make when they shoot.

Never did Chanyeol imagine getting shot at it in the middle of an empty road at three in the morning. He’d never imagined a confident smile still etched on his lips, much less asking someone to shoot to him.

The bullet stops _—_

 _—_ a centimeter away from Chanyeol’s forehead.

“Killing you would be messy,” Kyungsoo aims the gun away, bullet falling beside Chanyeol’s feet, “and I don’t have time for that.”

For a breath, they stare each other down, firelight shining on both their eyes.

A siren pierces the air. Loud. Wailing.

Kyungsoo freezes, looking at some point on the horizon. His walls come down. The wind resumes its path along the road.

A parked Harley is revealed neatly beside his Triumph. 

Chanyeol rushes over his own bike, slinging a leg over the seat, sparking the ignition, ready to chase again—

—but there’s a pressure on his wrist, and he’s being pulled off road—

“What is it?” Chanyeol asks, even if the constant ringing of alarms is answer enough.

“Be quiet,” Kyungsoo hisses, hand shaking on Chanyeol’s shoulders. He’s led to a cluster of trees and rocks, hiding behind a curve of the mountainside.

“They’re coming, twenty, maybe thirty units.”

And then it clicks: the third thing about the man beside him that Chanyeol is sure of. 

Do Kyungsoo is running.

From something or towards something, it won’t matter.

Not when Anyang troopers are closing in and he might be arrested for any fifty-or-so Regen discriminatory laws the city was famous for.

He finally has a proper hold on him. 

“All that trouble,” Chanyeol peeks out, assaulted by the oncoming wall of red, “to get caught by _troopers.”_

“In case I overestimated your intelligence,” Kyungsoo’s glare is heavier in the dark, “we’re _surrounded on all sides._ ”

Chanyeol feels the beginning of a scheme pull at his lips. _“You’re_ surrounded.”

“What?”

“I’m not the one running.” 

The alarms are a constant ringing through his head, but they’re easy to tune out.

Here is an opportunity, waiting to be taken.

“You’re the one that’s going to get caught with someone running,” Kyungsoo bites out, “so I’d suggest you start thinking.”

“I have a pass,” Chanyeol says. “’Official SM Business’ is all it’ll take. They’d let me go.”

Anyang, a city of fear: run by cowards in uniform.

One genuine threat to the little power they have and they fold like reeds in the wind, but any chance to exert it is milked to the very last drop.

Chanyeol doesn’t know what level of covert Kyungsoo needs to have, but the only reason you hide is if you have something too valuable to lose in a fight.

The sirens are starting to grate on his ears.

Chanyeol doesn’t know if he should take his familiarity with dealings like this as a comfort or a warning, but he sees it—the way Kyungsoo’s shoulders bunch tight, the way his eyes scan the ground for any way out.

He sees him fail.

“What do you want?” Kyungsoo asks, voice tight. “Why are you following me?”

Hook, line, sinker.

“Take me to Miocom,” Chanyeol answers. “Make sure I end my trip inside Kim Junmyeon’s office and I make sure you don’t end it here in Anyang.”

“Your apartment has blockers installed all over the perimeter,” Kyungsoo suddenly says, “personal travel license issued with automatic pass effective throughout New Korea.” 

“I—”

“Trained in weapons.”

Kyungsoo’s gaze takes on an edge. Maybe that’s what Chanyeol missed, during the milliseconds between his challenge to be killed and the pulling of a trigger.

“Trained in espionage. Top-of-the-line equipment except for that ancient tracker, so you must be Class S. What’s someone like you doing, playing cat-and-mouse with an operative you don’t know?”

Kyungsoo’s eyes narrow, and Chanyeol can almost feel the pieces sliding into place in his head. He’s a good player, Chanyeol will admit: probably the best he’s ever had to best. 

“You need me.”

“Right now,” Chanyeol growls, pushing through the strange clutch of fear that’s tightening his chest, “you need me more.”

A few well-placed cards was all it took for Kyungsoo to turn the tables, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before Chanyeol loses in a trade.

“Anyang complexes aren’t impenetrable,” Kyungsoo deals out. “It would take time, but I’d get out of there eventually. And then you’d lose the one thing you chased three whole cities for.”

Chanyeol hears the message, loud and clear.

_I’m not losing either._

“Are you seriously doing this _now?_ ” Chanyeol scoffs.

“I’m not about to be indebted to one of the most untrustworthy people I’ve ever met.”

The blinding flash of blue and red are starting to surround them, swallowing his firelight.

“It’s awfully convenient for you to forget that you’re the first one that tried to kill me in this relationship.”

“First of all,” Kyungsoo defends, gaze flitting around them, “you can’t say you wouldn’t do the same thing. Second of all, whatever we have isn’t a relationship.”

Maybe Chanyeol couldn’t win.

Maybe he didn’t need to.

“It could be an alliance,” Chanyeol declares.

There’s the screech of tires against the asphalt, closer and closer.

“You seemed to be in an awful hurry to get out of Seoul. You have a time limit, and you can’t afford to miss it by having to break out of jail.”

_“Anyang Division! Hands behind your backs!”_

The few seconds of silence are probably the heaviest they’ve ever shared.

Chanyeol has spent his whole life recognizing the moments when a person stacked the odds against each other—

He knows the sound of compromise well.

“I’ll take you to Daegu. Past Ulsan and Daejeon. I have—I can get you past the barriers, but no farther.”

“No,” Chanyeol grips his arm. “Get me inside Jeju. I can turn back around. I’ll make sure you have SM agents breathing down your neck for months.”

Kyungsoo’s lips gather into a thin line, hand reaching out to pinch the bridge of his nose.

“Okay,” Kyungsoo huffs, glaring, “alright. Jeju. I’ll get you through Jeju.”

“How do I know you’re not going to run off?”

“I have—there’s this— _god,_ Zhang Yixing lives in Daegu. He’s a retired operative, one of my closest friends, he’s got records everywhere.” 

It isn’t anywhere near an assurance, but Chanyeol believes the desperation in Kyungsoo’s tone is enough.

“You’re drunk and we’d just had a fight but we made up and now you’re horny,” Chanyeol covers Kyungsoo’s mouth with one hand, ruffles his hair with the other. 

_“What?”_

Chanyeol strips him of his jacket, throwing it to the ground. If there’s one thing anyone can use against conservative Anyang troopers, it’s the concept of sex. 

“Level three,” Chanyeol commands, “come on. Move.” 

Kyungsoo doesn’t—he only watches as Chanyeol brings the leather back up around his shoulders, watches as Chanyeol goes to loosen the shirt tucked into his pants.

“I’m going to kiss you now,” Chanyeol warns, “maybe bite a bit. Nothing personal, you know how it is.”

Kyungsoo’s mouth is unresponsive against his, so Chanyeol pulls back, glaring.

“You want to get out of here or not?”

_“Step out! Now!”_

Kyungsoo looks like he’s about to punch him. 

Just as they hear car doors being slammed shut, he growls, roughly collecting Chanyeol in his arms. “For fuck’s sake.” 

“For fuck’s sake indeed,” Chanyeol mutters against his lips, no more than a clumsy clash of teeth and survival.

He’s starting to slip into the needed headspace when it happens. 

Kyungsoo outright moans when Chanyeol slides his tongue into his mouth. 

The number one rule Chanyeol’s been trained to follow is to dissociate any inner feelings from what he needs to do. 

He should be impartial, collected. 

_Detached._

But gods help him—the sound is _so utterly stupid_ it has Chanyeol breaking character—he’s laughing _,_ breathy chuckles into Kyungsoo’s mouth, the sound getting funnier each time it plays over in his mind, and _shit,_ they’re going to be so fucked—

“Shut up.” 

A particularly hard pinch on his side causes him to yelp, but it does the trick of pushing him back on track.

Hands slide past the bare skin under his shirt, just in time for flashlights to shine on both of them. 

The both of them freeze, and Chanyeol swears he feels desperation in the way Kyungsoo’s breath hitches, feels it in the bunching of his shirt between Kyungsoo’s fingers.

“Step out,” the trooper says, “ _now.”_

Chanyeol heaves him up, quickly pulling out his ID and pass from his jacket pocket.

“He’s drunk,” Chanyeol says, smiles like he’s embarrassed.

The men around them start staring at Kyungsoo—the operative is leaning most of his weight into Chanyeol’s side, nuzzling at his chest.

“We’ve traced Level Five signatures at play here.”

“Just me,” Chanyeol grunts, slapping a straying hand on the way to his hips. “I was trying to give him a show, but the sun flares this time of year are really bad. It was probably just your gear messing up again.”

Kyungsoo clings to him as much as possible when they try to get closer. 

“He’s a civilian,” he repeats, covering him. 

“Where are you going?”

“Back to the hotel,” Chanyeol raises his brows suggestively. “Never too tired for it.”

“There’s two motorcycles.”

_Shit._

“It’s why we’re out here in the first place,” Chanyeol rushes, “he has a habit of stealing from my collection. Kids these days, buy them a car and they think they can touch any key they land their eyes on.”

“You’re from SM,” the officer squints, bringing a flashlight to Chanyeol’s face. When the beam settles on Kyungsoo’s, he whines, burying his head into Chanyeol’s jacket even more.

“Official business,” Chanyeol tries, “but it’s the weekend, and I made a few stops.”

“Babe,” Kyungsoo cries, “when will we get there?”

“Do me a favor and get my other bike to the location I send you,” Chanyeol forces them to look at him. “I do you a favor back and talk about you in front of the Chief of Staff. That sound alright?”

“Babe,” Kyungsoo says again, this time gripping the buckles of Chanyeol’s belt. “Want you.”

It does the trick; Chanyeol sees most of the troopers turn away, hear some groans of either homophobia or embarrassment. 

Kyungsoo’s fingers graze his crotch. The squeak Chanyeol lets out is genuine.

“This one’s about to drop,” he implores, slapping Kyungsoo’s hand away yet again, “and between you and me, I think it’ll be on his knees.”

The officer clings to their last thread of skepticism. “You’re getting a drunk on a motorcycle?”

“He becomes a good boy when I offer rewards,” Chanyeol winks. “Need any more details?”

Finally— _finally_ —the trooper’s resolve crumbles, coughing into his fist and turning away. “No, you’re good to go. False alarm, SM Co. Class S.”

Kyungsoo keeps up the act until they reach his bike. 

“I’m not sitting between your legs,” he hisses. Their faces are close, but Kyungsoo still has to look up. 

“They won’t believe you’re drunk until you sit in front of me,” Chanyeol snaps, “so just push through and do it. They’re looking for a fuck-up.”

While they’ve already been let go, most of the officers are still watching, muttering amongst themselves.

Most Regens tended to avoid Anyang for this exact discrimination—the blatant gazes waiting for any excuse at brutality—and the bastards still aren’t ready to let their little early-morning trip go to waste.

Kyungsoo senses it too; which is probably why he hooks his hand behind Chanyeol’s neck and pulls him in for another kiss. This one is _rough,_ and there’s collective dissent to their show—Chanyeol takes it one step further and carries Kyungsoo into the seat, hiking his shirt up.

“The fuck,” Kyungsoo says, raising an eyebrow when the last of the cars have disappeared around the bend, “was that?”

“You’ve been biting my lip like no there’s no tomorrow,” Chanyeol points out, “and you’re surprised that I manhandle you to my bike? Let’s get this over with, dumbass. There’s one left, and he’s bringing your Harley over to the hotel.”

“Your breath is disgusting,” Kyungsoo flings out one last time, settling on the front of the seat.

“Your moan was stupid,” Chanyeol mocks back, and he can’t stop the slight tilt of his mouth upwards, “worst I’ve heard in my life. Were you trying to make them think I was fucking a minor? What _was_ that?”

It doesn’t take a fire-wielder to see the tips of Kyungsoo’s ears turn red in the cold morning air, and it pulls at Chanyeol’s humor mechanism even more. 

He doesn’t know how Kyungsooo senses it too; doesn’t know how he knows Chanyeol might start teasing. 

“It would be a shame if your bike accidentally crumpled to an irretrievable lump of metal tomorrow.”

Chanyeol rolls his eyes, punching in the coordinates for a hotel Jongin recommended earlier on. He’d refused because he’d thought his next stop was over at Busan, so he didn’t have a reservation, but Jongin might have done it anyway. 

“Would be a shame for your pretty little Harley to have melted tires too, wouldn’t it?”

_was the merchant kind to you?_

_—he did not need to be.—_

_—i was set to escape.—_

_but was he kind?_

_—no. he treated me coldly, and i the same.—_

__

Chanyeol appreciates how everything just gradually crashes back to him for every step they take towards the room Jongin had booked for him. 

By the time they realize there’s only one bed, a tired thrum is already going through his chest, limbs aching for the harsh heat of a shower and the soft weight of sheets on his skin. 

There is no argument; Kyungsoo doesn’t even blink before rummaging through his bag and heading straight for the bathroom. 

He isn’t affected by the proximity either. The bed is small, and when Chanyeol only nods when he asks if he’s alright with them sharing, he just crawls in without ceremony. 

They’re only just barely touching, but Chanyeol feels his breathing evening out, his limbs going slack straight into sleep. 

He doesn’t blame Kyungsoo for the indifference _—_ Chanyeol knows how efficient you have to be when you’re operative. 

There is rarely ever cause for feelings: a bed is a bed, exhaustion is exhaustion. 

But Chanyeol can’t seem to get a proper hold on sleep. 

He knew he needed to come back to the hand of fear that clutched at his chest, the split second between _kill me_ and the _bang_ of Kyungsoo pulling the trigger. 

Chanyeol had frozen in front of the gun, undercurrent of dread running through his blood not because there might have been a bullet lodged in his body, but because of the simple truth manifesting between one breath and the next.

It makes him uncomfortable. 

It makes him feel seen.

It dredges up the desire to form a connection where there should be none—a desire to pick Kyungsoo apart in an effort to know that Chanyeol wasn’t the only one in their world left with a conscience.

_He can injure, but not kill._

Chanyeol knows now. 

He knows that the tremble in Kyungsoo’s fingers will be from concentration and not nervousness. He knows that all threats of death will be reduced to _near-death_ , will be left open with a chance of survival.

He knows that Kyungsoo is weak.

Chanyeol knows because he is exactly the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes the foxes will butt in from to time and yes, they are (somewhat) relevant bc they reflect/foreshadow scenes/moods/themes


	4. Chapter 4

_LOCATION: [COVERT OP] CLEARANCE S_

_STATUS: NT [0800: 12.22/23]_

_REPORT: AS OF 12.23.79_

_Multiple attempted attacks by |_

Chanyeol’s hands still on top of the keyboard.

Kyungsoo had gone earlier to buy more clothes, and given him hidden pathways on the network as assurance that he’ll come back.

The line blinks up at him, waiting for Kyungsoo’s name.

Do Kyungsoo, per a whole day of hunting down what little information he could: a high-level agent that had been working for Miocom for the past five years, recently stationed as a general floating operative through all of its territories.

The simplicity of it all is almost mocking: Chanyeol belonged to no other side but SM, no other loyalties but Jongin and Sehun and his family.

It should be easy.

Do Kyungsoo did not deserve protection.

The night Chanyeol had found him was during a botched operation— _null agent_ are the words Miocom chooses to call its traitors, and this one gave way for an ambush.

But there are only a few sparse missions Miocom is allowed to do on SM’s side of the country.

They didn’t need to do it either—the drug ring they’d been targeting was dispatched by Chanyeol and a few other experiments months before.

What was a floating operative doing in _Seoul_ , on an operation that looked like a waste of resources, one month after the Motherheart was stolen?

Chanyeol feels a rush through his fingertips—one he hasn’t felt in a long time—he was grasping at straws, but he knows it’s there: the glimmer in events he’s spent years analyzing, the hidden corner of all situations that unlocks all else.

To Chanyeol, everything is a tapestry, and right now, Do Kyungsoo will be the thread he needs to unravel the search for the Motherheart.

He might even lead him to Agent 12.

Threads like him were to be treated with patience, with care, with _trust—_ they are so easily broken, so easily cut.

_unknown operative. Possible link to Miocom. Request for blackout clearance immediately_. _|_

Not a minute after he sends the report, his phone flashes with a message of a location and time, gone before Chanyeol can write it down.

_you must have escaped eventually._

_—i needed him to get me through the roads.—_

_—on my own, i would have died of many things.—_

The ever-present flaw in his plan that won’t seem to leave Chanyeol alone: this particular thread insists on wrapping itself around his thoughts.

Do Kyungsoo squeezes tight with every move.

_I know you._

“I know who you’re looking for,” he says now, emerging from the shower.

It’s a whole week after the night when they made their alliance, and Chanyeol has one last thing to do before setting things in motion.

Kyungsoo had been tolerant through it all, suspiciously shrugging at the extensions Chanyeol had requested, only grilling him for cash when it came to the hotel rebooking fees.

“I can help you.”

_We are the same._

“You’re already helping me,” Chanyeol says, not looking up from his laptop. “I almost thought you’d run off, you know. It would be so easy.”

“Just as easy as following me?”

“We all have our talents,” Chanyeol replies. “I’m sure it was just as easy as tampering with my gear.”

“No,” Kyungsoo says, “that was much easier. It’s a second away from crumbling to dust. All I did was put in a magnet, but honestly, I could’ve just smacked it.”

Chanyeol knows this game.

“Insulting someone you want to trade with isn’t usually the way to go.”

Kyungsoo hums, moving over to the edge of the bed. He pushes Chanyeol’s laptop shut.

“I know where Agent 12 is. I know where he’s headed.”

Chanyeol should be cautious, _wary_ , of how easy all of this is to Kyungsoo, but the challenge in his tone is making Chanyeol want to bite back.

“Who?”

“I already had a hunch, you know. Why someone like Park Chanyeol would follow someone like me. You’d go in circles if I did too.”

Kyungsoo looks at him, his full name sending alarm coursing through his veins. It hadn’t occurred to him that Kyungsoo would ever need it.

The carelessness would need to be addressed soon.

“And then I figured it out when you showed me your badge.”

“I didn’t—“

But the events of that night come flashing back to him, sending a stone sinking down his gut. 

Kyungsoo nuzzling into his jacket. 

Kyungsoo feeling him up, hands distracting under his shirt as Chanyeol dealt with the troopers. 

Kyungsoo gripping his wrist, right after they gave him his pass back.

“It’s nice to meet you,” there’s a smile pulling at the side of Kyungsoo’s lips—the smile of someone that thinks he has the upper hand. “Experiment 61."

_did he put you in a cage?_

_—no. he put me on a leash.—_

_did it matter, in the end?_

_—yes. i can bite through a leash.—_

When Kim Junmyeon walks through the door, Chanyeol is convinced he’s dreaming. 

But he’s there: suit cutting straight across his shoulders, wire-framed glasses resting on an elegant nose. He’s surrounded by hard air, no doubt Kyungsoo’s doing, stationed somewhere in the hotel. 

Chanyeol had only scoffed when Kyungsoo offered to bring Kim Junmyeon over. He was sure it was a joke, but should’ve known to never underestimate Kyungsoo again.

“Kyungsoo says you don’t trust him.” 

Chanyeol roams his gaze over his front; looking for any hidden cameras. 

“I see you don’t trust me either,” Kim Junmyeon says. “But that’s fair.” 

The head of Miocom offers Chanyeol a trade: three months of assisting Kyungsoo on five select missions, and he’ll have Agent 12. 

“Did Kyungsoo tell you about me, Mr. Kim?”

“Junmyeon is fine,” he waves, walking over to the window. “He’s told me what he could, but I know more about you than him. We had this alliance with SM back then, did they tell you?”

Junmyeon snorts, self-depreciating. He produces a pen from his pocket and starts spinning it.

“When we thought that was still a good idea, of course. Experiment 61 was one of the few that kept making it to the prototype team.” 

“And why is that?”

“They always said you were the best,” Junmyeon hums, “but they gave us Agent 12.”

Chanyeol frowns. He and Agent 12 might be closer than he’d originally thought. Not in any personal way—but Chanyeol wonders how many times he’d slipped past him in the elevators, if he’d ever seen his true face.

Agent 12 and Experiment 61 don’t sound like people.

They’d always sounded like statistics, skill sets, always just below the other in the boards. Chanyeol supposes that it would have made sense for their paths to cross at least once.

“He was safer, they said. He was more predictable than you could ever be. We still studied your records though, kept track of your missions. We liked your style, but SM didn’t want to rent its two best operatives at the same time.” 

Chanyeol finds it, tucked into the corner of his suit pocket. It’s hidden by the cap of his other pen. “Who’s listening to us right now?”

Junmyeon flicks his gaze over to the door, mouth twisting into a wry smile. 

“The way I see it,” Chanyeol says, “you have me do your work and leave me empty-handed. It’s crucial that Agent 12 comes back to SM with me. I already have Kyungsoo taking me to Jeju, and I’m not dumb enough to fall any deeper into dealings with Miocom as you are about having your agent deal with me.”

“Kyungsoo says you’re desperate.” 

The words ring back to Chanyeol, back to when Kyungsoo first proposed his operation.

He revealed he knew what Chanyeol was.

_You experimentals really should learn to at least make fake identities._

He’d taken his motives apart, one-by-one, and Chanyeol had sat there, frozen, strangely helpless.

“We offer you a concrete plan of action, Chanyeol.” Junmyeon tosses a black box to him. “We will help you retrieve Agent 12.”

Chanyeol turns it onto its side. Smooth, no opening. The question is clear, and Junmyeon plucks it out of the air. 

“We will have SM’s best operative working on the missions Miocom’s been stuck on for years,” Junmyeon says. “High-value targets, high-risk searching. We have our own agents, it’s true, but..."

_Ah._

“You don’t have enough of them,” Chanyeol finishes. 

The biggest difference between the two companies isn’t just their sheer size: it’s that Miocom had one of the most rigorous admission processes of any agency. Their contracts spanned years, their agents freer than SM’s, looser relationships with their higher-ups. 

But there are downfalls to building a network through loyalty. 

_Like an alliance,_ Kyungsoo had said, throwing Chanyeol’s words back to his face. _You started this, 61._

“It’s too neat,” Chanyeol narrows his eyes. “Why are you giving Agent 12 up?”

Junmyeon blinks.

“Kyungsoo was right about you,” he finally says, chuckling. “Agent 12 is a very complicated person. We have reason to believe he’s leaving Asia after his brother died in a stake-out—one of our own, foul play. He wants to drive Miocom to the ground, and he’ll use SM— _you—_ to do it.”

“So you don’t have the Motherheart?”

Junmyeon takes out his pen. He taps it twice, revealing a small blade. Next comes drops of blood, cascading down his thumb. 

The box lights up when the blood reaches its surface, cover sliding apart to reveal a small projection, spinning in the air. 

“I always thought it was foolish to have one chip to contain all valuable pieces of information,” he says, wiping his blood with a tissue. “But with how many agents SM has, I concede to its necessity.”

Chanyeol thinks it’s stupid himself, but he doesn’t say that.

“I have no use for the Motherheart,” Junmyeon walks over to Chanyeol, spreading his hands wide. “The agreement SM’s given us works well, and we aren’t out to monopolize the agency services in New Korea. This box will be your insurance.”

A beam of light: codes upon codes, pictures and addresses. It’s his personal file.

“I have no doubt that you know how to wreck someone’s life with the right information,” Junmyeon says. “You can cross-check, if you want. You’re holding the head of Miocom’s everything, minus the important codes, of course.”

Their reason sounded flimsy at best, held together only by the leverage in Chanyeol’s hand.

If he accepts this, he’d be with Kyungsoo for at least three more months, leaving little space for his own plans. The five missions Junmyeon had presented would take up most of his time and energy.

But here was the head of Miocom willing to die—all in an effort to vouch for the capture of Agent 12.

He consoles himself that he could walk out of it anytime. Coercion not by fear was unfamiliar, but it wasn’t strange. Chanyeol could navigate less-traveled waters too.

“I’ll need more evidence on 12,” Chanyeol sighs, gears already whirring in his head. “More proof that you can bring him to me, or I drop everything.”

“I’ll have more info on him sent in by next week,” Junmyeon nods. There isn’t a hint of smugness in his voice, not even a sign that he’s glad Chanyeol accepted.

If anything, the idea seems to weigh him down—and Chanyeol wonders if it’s his own.

Kyungsoo only nods at him when Junmyeon leaves, looking even more solemn.

His new clothes are strangely domestic, denim jeans over a pullover, and his hair is ruffled from the wind.

They were such stupid things to notice.

He’s making his way to the bed when Chanyeol catches his wrist.

“Wait,” he says.

When Kyungsoo looks at him, the nonexistent words seem to die in his throat. He doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know why he stopped him.

“First mission is tomorrow,” Kyungsoo says, picking up on the silence. “Go buy clothes if you need to. We’re going to be travelling around a lot.” 

“Don’t follow me.”

Kyungsoo scoffs, brow rising. “Why would I shop with you?”

_how did you escape?_

_—i gained the daughter's trust.—_

_—she kept me by her side to weed out trickery; she believed me cunning.—_

_was she not right?_

_—she was.—_

_too cunning, i assume._

_—it is her own fault, for trusting something wild.—_

The car stops in front of a three-story house by the road, red paint flicking off its windows. On a good day, it attracted tourists, ivy clambering on its walls and into the rooftops.

 _Lady Luck_ is advertised online as a homestay for people that had no more rooms over in Jeju during the peak season.

There is one room that’s never used, though.

It’s reserved for people like Chanyeol.

The landlady only nods back when Chanyeol passes her by, handing him a clear glass tablet. She’s never seen him before, and will probably never see him again.

The dull switch of locks being turned follows Chanyeol all the way to the third floor, into the room at the end of the corridor.

This room has no bed, no toilet.

It has no windows, not even wallpaper: the color is set to a uniform gray, accompanied by white lining along the sides and corners. Despite its lack of necessities, the room is well lit, designed to accommodate the only two pieces of furniture: a table and chair settled in the very middle.

Chanyeol places the tablet down.

He drinks from the glass of water beside the table leg to his right, wincing at the staleness. Only then does the tablet light up, projecting a soundwave into the beam above him.

“LO11321EY27,” he says, for confirmation. “TJ0188.”

The soundwave goes from red to green.

Lee Sangtae’s voice rings out from the tablet. “Blackout clearance is a big thing to ask for, 61.”

“He will be the key to finding Agent 12,” Chanyeol says. “He’s offered to guide me to Miocom.”

The director’s first mistake was when he admitted that SM was desperate, back at the office. Chanyeol didn’t need to be the only one tucked into a corner.

SM wouldn’t be so stupid as to lay all of its information in a single chip, but it was the idea of it being in the wrong hands that made things so dangerous.

“And you’re sure Miocom’s behind this?”

Chanyeol clears his throat. His hands start tapping against the table, anticipation building in his gut.

“One month before the Motherheart is stolen, three operatives travel to Seoul for a vacation,” he starts. “Three weeks, an agent of theirs applies for transfer, manning the city nearest to SM’s boundaries.”

They’d never approve of Chanyeol working with Miocom.

He needs this to work.

He needs SM blind.

“Two weeks before and an entourage arrives for the renewal of contracts, Kim Junmyeon among them—but it’s also when we do maintenance for our prisoner’s cells. One week and one of ours goes MIA.”

He can almost hear the frown creasing Lee Sangtae’s face.

“None of those activities are related to Agent 12.”

“I believe they’re set-ups,” Chanyeol defends. “Meant to misdirect and have us targeting other people.”

“And you’re sure of this stray you’re following?”

“Yes sir.”

The silence is both a cause for anxiety and comfort: Chanyeol is too trusted to be questioned about his motives, but his motives are too filled with doubt and guesswork to be properly trusted.

He knows it will come down to his past successes: the missions he carried, the styles he’s used to accomplish them.

“Consistent unpredictability has much to do with instincts, sir,” Chanyeol hurries, sensing a rejection. “I survived through all your black-labels because of my intuition. I hope you trust them enough for this.”

There’s a click. The line stays silent for a long while.

“The only thing you have going for you is that you’re too weak to let five people die,” Sangtae gruffs out, just as Chanyeol is beginning to give up. “Kim Jongin and Oh Sehun are operatives of SM. We will not hesitate to use them.”

Chanyeol never doubted it. “Understood.”

“Blackout clearance to OR16281 officially granted. Three months, 61. Drag him back alive.”


	5. Chapter 5

_“And if they make a run for it?”_

The constant rumbling of his motorbike has faded to a steady thrum, evergreen trees flitting by as they speed through the streets. 

“I take the secretary,” Chanyeol says, voice bouncing inside his helmet, “and the guards.”

Kyungsoo had said they would start small. Political. 

A governor’s daughter would be the key to exposing her father that duped a sector’s chairperson into committing tax fraud.

Why politicians needed to be _duped_ into committing tax fraud, Chanyeol will never know; those things always seem to come naturally to crocodiles like them.

If anything, this was an attempt at washing his hands. 

Miocom had been working on it for months, accepting only because the chairperson helped them establish the contract with SM all those years ago.

It would be simple, almost low-level, if it weren’t for the fact that the governor was a high-ranking senator’s right hand.

The man’s preset defenses took _days_ to unpack. The house was guarded in every way possible, systems rotating between three AIs: designed to form new misdirection patterns while one was being dismantled. 

They’d agreed that the quickest way they could get evidence was through planting a chip in the daughter’s bag—granting Kyungsoo access to the house mainframe.

The chairperson was adamant about getting a confession though, and that’s why they have this plan of cornering the father-daughter tandem after their latest event.

Right from the start, Chanyeol had looked for places where he and Kyungsoo might clash; areas of friction, trying his hardest to be as uncooperative as the mission might allow. 

The nearest he’d gone was seeing a hint of disapproval on Kyungsoo’s face when Chanyeol didn’t want to leave the planning to the next day—when he’d waved him off to go to sleep first. 

He supposes it makes sense.

Kyungsoo is an operative like him, and their first night together is more than enough to confirm that he could deal with Chanyeol. 

But there’s something unnatural in the way Chanyeol’s skills fit neatly against Kyungsoo’s—strengths complementing his weaknesses—his sniper-accuracy for Chanyeol’s mastery in hand-to-hand, his defense superiority against Chanyeol’s powerful offense maneuvers. 

_“Then we rendezvous to point Alpha at midnight. Any later and we go over to Charlie.”_

Chanyeol huffs, a sharp exhale that transmits to his mic.

Stupidity seems to be clinging to Chanyeol too much these days—he’d been having ridiculous thoughts of Kyungsoo being more capable than other operatives he’d worked with before.

It would lead to trust, _genuine_ trust, but Chanyeol convinces himself that there will be something.

Everything had a catch, in the end.

He’d been careless when it came to Kyungsoo already. He couldn’t afford to do it again.

 _“What,_ ” Kyungsoo quips. His bike appears at Chanyeol’s side, slowing down to accommodate his speed. _“Was there something we missed?”_

“No.”

_“Just spit it out.”_

“Nothing,” Chanyeol insists, rolling his eyes. “I’m just tired.”

It’s a second before Kyungsoo speaks again.

_“That’s a lot of audacity for someone that won’t stop waking me up in the middle of the night because he can’t sleep still.”_

“It’s not like I touch you,” Chanyeol scoffs. 

_“You hug me, Park.”_

When what Kyungsoo said finally settles on his mind, he almost crashes into the car in front of him. _“What?”_

 _“Fucking octopus.”_ Kyungsoo’s chuckle is deep, mocking.

“And you just _let me?”_

He’d recently noticed that he kept waking up on the other side of the bed he’d slept in, but he’d always assumed he moved until only after Kyungsoo woke up and the space was free.

_“I know a lost case when I feel one.”_

“You should have just pushed me away,” Chanyeol groans, suddenly grateful for his tinted helmet. “Or did you _like_ it?”

 _“You tell me,”_ Kyungsoo says. _“You ever had a Park Chanyeol fight with you in his sleep before? You know how those things find you even after you kick them off the bed?”_

“I do _not_ do that,” Chanyeol clips, although now that Kyungsoo mentions it, he’s suddenly unsure of himself. Part of being a fire-wielder meant being familiar to heat, and his cheeks have always been no exception.

“Why would you even say something like that before a mission, oh my god—“

 _“Yeah, well,”_ Kyungsoo laughs fully, and it’s surprisingly bright, _“I figured embarrassment would be easier to snap you out of.”_

Chanyeol blinks. He can’t even drudge up a comeback—he’d let Kyungsoo distract him. Something he would have to make sure to never do again.

_“Move, 61.”_

Kyungsoo’s Harley cuts into his way, and Chanyeol curses, almost swerving into the car running past him.

_“No more distractions. You have a date to pull off.”_

“Did it go right?” Kyungsoo asks, settling in front of Chanyeol.

The daughter was charmed enough to invite him home, but Chanyeol had whispered, smooth and low, how maybe a hotel would be nicer.

After she left, Chanyeol had torn the tissue paper she’d written her number on.

“You tell me,” Chanyeol says, playing with his drink. He’d just been on his way to get back to where they’d parked their bikes. “I think I could have fit a whole shoe in there and she’d still think it was me trying to get laid.”

Kyungsoo snorts. “You that big of a flirt, Park?” 

“Takes one to know one,” Chanyeol tilts the glass towards him. “Why are you here? You could’ve just waited for me.”

“I want a date with you too," Kyungsoo winks. 

Chanyeol rolls his eyes but takes the bait. No harm in a little bit of playfulness.

"I have a boyfriend," he says, "sorry.”

“Yeah?” Kyungsoo leans forward, close enough to get into Chanyeol’s space. “I’m saying you could have a husband.”

A second passes by.

Chanyeol tries to hold it in.

He fails.

“Damn,” Chanyeol laughs, “you’re worse than me.”

Kyungsoo's laughing too _—_ lips breaking out in the shape of a heart. 

“Better,” he corrects, smile still playing at the corners of his mouth. “Seemed like you needed a break.”

“Oh? And what else do you think I need, Kyungsoo?”

Kyungsoo raises his brows. "Focus."

Chanyeol supposes he should be more vigilant, but today, he decides to forget.

It's when they're about to head back that Kyungsoo reaches inside his jacket. 

The folder is unassuming, almost empty.

“From Junmyeon,” he jerks his chin towards it. “Everything in that is true.”

_Operative 87 – MIOCOM CONTRACT MY642NG_

_[TERMINATED]_

“Agent 12 liked tailing after hyung, and hyung was loud enough to keep bragging about his brother. Everyone at the agency knows about him one way or another.”

_was it difficult?_

_staying by her side?_

_—no.—_

_—it felt like i belonged there.—_

Chanyeol is starting to feel like he’s been keeping watch over the hotel room for longer than he probably should have.

“I’m breaking it,” Chanyeol mutters. “If you gave me the wrong room number, I swear to god—“

 _“No,”_ comes Kyungsoo’s immediate reply crackling over the transmitters. _“Hold position. SM’s top agent never been on a stakeout before?”_

“Stakeouts are for when you have a decent lead on something,” Chanyeol mutters, “not when you’re guessing about where a chairman might eat lunch.”

 _“Stop whining,”_ Kyungsoo says. _“You’re not the one on a rooftop in the middle of noon. Hot as fuck up here.”_

“I told you to let me snipe.”

 _“You’re not the better shot between us either,”_ Kyungsoo quips, _“so just shut up and get ready. It’s ending.”_

Outside the lobby, the streets of downtown Daejeon are overflowing with people and flowers.

Kids run amok with flower crowns draped over their heads, adults brandishing whatever pieces of greenery they can find.

Ever since the rise of New Korea, Daejeon was one of the few cities aside from Daegu to focus its trade on tourism—designing towering greenhouses filled with city-wide nature reserves and overflowing mini-forests.

December was a month-long observance of their own festivals—bright streets colored by string lights, the air filled with the saccharine scent of fruit preserves and flowers.

Chanyeol remembers his first kiss on one of the ferris wheels from pop-up amusement parks down the metro: overlooking the towering citylines, sweaty palms on soft fingers.

The boy he was dating was much more experienced than he was.

A year-end parade marked the end of festivities, going on from early morning to noon.

For the chairman, it might well be his last.

 _“Positions,”_ Kyungsoo says. The static tells Chanyeol he’s using the public line, connected to all sixteen of their earpieces.

 _“16,”_ a voice says. _“Targets incoming. Team waiting for your cue.”_

Chanyeol glances at the street, his rhythmic tapping against one of the couches undisturbed. There—almost too easy to spot, a man in a white suit surrounded by men in dark sunglasses.

“Asshole,” Chanyeol mumbles, standing up. “He likes being noticed too much. Act I in motion, hold.”

A human rights group had recently commissioned Miocom on a public official that held a long history of physical abuse against everyone that worked for him.

Even his guards weren’t untouchable.

Everyone that opposed him was either beaten or killed, and Chanyeol had taken much enthusiasm in shaking him up with blackmail a week before.

 _“Route clear on fifth and eleventh,”_ Kyungsoo is back, _“I’ll tell you when.”_

“Yes sir,” Chanyeol smirks, imagining the frown on the other’s face before remembering that they were using the public line.

He clears his throat. “And the others?”

 _“Mild foot traffic up on twelve,”_ one says.

 _“Heavy up on third,”_ says the other. _“Filled with civilians.”_

“Mark three up for me.”

And then Chanyeol follows them over into the elevator.

_"Park."_

The squeeze is tight, bodies close together.

He counts ten, some glowering at him outright. 

Chanyeol’s hoodie is baggie enough to hide the weapons on his belt—Kyungsoo had suggested dressing casual to avoid suspicion.

 _“What the hell are you doing?”_ Kyungsoo hisses. _“Do you have a death wish? The plan was to wait until they’d get to the same floor—“_

Chanyeol turns the private line off.

The plan wouldn’t have worked anyway.

They would see Chanyeol at some point and another, and given the track record Kyungsoo had meticulously pushed off the table the night before, they’d bring him somewhere else the team couldn’t reach.

There are three separate escape cars, all snipe-proof, for him to ride on when the bodyguards sense anything wrong.

Better to assimilate and last to the hotel room, where he’d be sure the chairman would feel safe enough in his bulletproof enforced walls and shoddy doorlocks.

Kyungsoo couldn’t snipe if there was nothing to shoot.

But they don’t make a move to get off on the second floor. They wait for him to step out, and Chanyeol quickly retrieves a packet of cigarettes from his pocket before turning the line back on.

Already, Kyungsoo is frantic.

 _“The real-time records don’t show any changes to a change in room,”_ he says, voice hurried. _“I’m sure I didn’t mix anything up—“_

“You didn’t,” Chanyeol shushes. He walks down the walkway, cheap carpet cushioning his steps. “It’s standard procedure. They were making sure I wasn’t following them.”

He spots an empty room, probably open for cleaning.

“They’ll be back. Team Alpha, you still there?”

A click of the line. _“Affirmative. Still waiting.”_

“Soon.”

Not a minute after, Chanyeol’s net senses new heat signatures coming down from the stairs.

His blood goes cold.

The bodyguards that were at the parade were ten.

Now, there’s at least thirty.

 _“Get out of there,”_ Kyungsoo’s voice is rushed, syllables tripping over one another. _“I’m calling it. There’s too many of them."_

Chanyeol isn't listening.

The timing had to be _perfect_.

Too early and they’d kill him and have some left to escort the chairman to an escape car. Too late and there might be too many for the team to quietly dismantle.

“No,” Chanyeol replies. “I can do this. Team Alpha, get ready for close contact.”

 _“Don’t be stupid,”_ Kyungsoo hisses. _“Know when you’re beat.”_

“Something about me, Kyungsoo. I know when I can risk it.”

He steps out, just as the whole entourage passes through his door. He pulls out a lighter, practiced flip pronounced by a _chink_ as the metal grates on metal.

The first attempt fails—there’s no spark.

Chanyeol stops midway, pretending to focus.

The second attempt fails too.

The chairman finds his key.

He pulls it out, sliding it into the lock.

The door opens. Boots thud from the staircase. Time for the signal. The spark finally finds its fire _—_ followed immediately by a sharp whistle echoing through the closed hotel walkway.

There’s the scrunch of metal biting into flesh. Two guards go down, and there's three seconds before everything explodes into action. 

Chanyeol takes two knives from his belt.

An exhale—it lands square on the chairman’s wrist.

Inhale—another lodges itself into his ankle.

His screams wouldn't have be so disappointing if he didn't muffle them. 

When Chanyeol sees the guards shove them into his room, he brings an arm up. Three make it past the wall of fire, but Kyungsoo could take care of them.

He has 25 people to outrun.

He breaks for the rooftop, legs heavy as he jumps three steps at a time. When he finally gets there, his eyes immediately flick to the weighted ropes he’d set up the night before.

Daejeon is a city of buildings just as much as it is a city of nature. It boasts neighborhoods with residential apartments so close to one another their local government had to ban rooftop hopping a few years before.

He fiddles with the system, just as 25— _13 now—_ men burst through the small door.

"Why are some missing _—_ "

_“They’re waiting for you down the streets. There’s a whole force about to plug you with holes from below.”_

A _bang_ comes from his side—bolts of black smoke strike Chanyeol everywhere—he stumbles back, blinded.

 _”Park,”_ Kyungsoo says, voice terse, _“report.”_

Snarling, Chanyeol reaches for his fire. He wills it to travel along the lines of smoke, using it to descend on the door handles, flaming hot.

When he’s satisfied that not a single one of them is going back downstairs, he goes for the ropes—the mid-noon sun will fuck up their vision anyway, better to risk it—

Something grips at his ankle and _pulls._

Chanyeol lands with a blow to his hips, pain blooming on his side, racing through his bones.

_“Park!”_

Chanyeol grits his teeth as cloth wraps around his neck, heaving him up to kneel against concrete.

“Who do you work for?”

In front of him, one of the men cut his ropes, taking out a knife and severing the pulley system neatly.

Chanyeol scowls.

So much work, wasted.

One of them slaps him in the face. “We asked you a question.”

“Step back,” Chanyeol growls. “I work for myself.”

Chanyeol grabs the nearest arm above him and pulls it over his back, launching a man over his head.

He flips his baton from his belt with expert precision, using it to strike their soft spots—back of the knees, their wrists—some fall straight to ground, but some already have their guns out—Chanyeol uses it to take cover behind a water tank. 

“Kyungsoo,” he tries, testing out his ankle. Sharp pain bolts through his leg, and he stifles a cry.

“How long do I have to get to your position?”

_"Probably four minutes before they raid this building. Can you jump on that thing?”_

A bullet pings on the floor beside Chanyeol’s feet.

Deep breaths, until the pain is reduced to a dull throbbing.

“We’re about to find out.”

Knives cut into his ankle once he steps forward, but he runs, faster and faster, gaining momentum—

He jumps. 

For a moment, Chanyeol is suspended, barely feeling his heart leap up throat before he’s rolling off the other rooftop.

There’s no time for victory. The cityline passes by in a blur, breaths getting harder and harder to catch.

The bullets are coming from everywhere now. 

"Kyungsoo!"

 _"I'm a little busy—“_ Chanyeol hears bodies slamming against metal, " _—_ _at the moment!"_

The fact that they've found Kyungsoo warrants enough caution to _not_ go to where he is, but Chanyeol has no choice left. There are feet thudding behind him, and he can only hope he's faster.

One rooftop. Two.

The pain is heavier now. He can’t pull up enough air.

 _“Thirty seconds,"_ Kyungsoo's voice sounds forced, a thud sounding like metal on bricks, _"visual_ _acquired. God, don’t zigzag, Park. I might hit you.”_

Behind him, men go down. The screech of water tanks falling grates on his ears.

Chanyeol sees it—Kyungsoo’s sniper, peeking out from a ledge.

He’s still running when he skids to a stop, biting back a curse, cement hot under his shoes. The jump is too far. He'll never make it. 

He searches frantically for the pulley systems he'd installed for this exact reason—he finds them untouched, metal glinting as the sun beats down on his neck.

He’s about to pull his way through when he sees a crossbow a few floors below, aimed at directly at him. 

He flinches back just in time to watch as the ropes snap against each other, losing traction down the side of a building with no other handholds.

"Fuck," he says, frustration mixing with the claws searing their way across his skin—it's either he fights 20 men on a broken ankle or use his already snuffed powers, _"fuck—"_

_“Jump!”_

A bullet barely misses him, and Chanyeol dodges the next, sending his fire snaking out at random. Cries of surprise flare the same time his wall does, but he knows he won’t be able to keep it up for long.

_“You have to jump, Park!”_

“Are you blind?” Chanyeol shouts.

_“Are you stupid?”_

“No one can make that distance, Kyungsoo! I control fire, _not space!”_

_“I have a plan—I'll catch you, I promise!"_

“Your plans are shit!”

_“Now is not the time!”_

Chanyeol yelps when concrete ricochets dangerously near his hand—his wall is down, and it’s going to be seconds before they’re on him.

_“Trust me! There'll be blocks for you—I can't hold position for much longer—just fucking jump already!"_

In that split-second, Chanyeol makes a choice.

If he’s wrong, it would be his last.

If he’s right, it would be his most reckless.

He backs up, starts running. 

He can't even pray properly.

There are too many gods to choose from.

He jumps.

He’s only halfway through the air when the ground is starting to yawn from underneath him, gravity taking over—

His ankles land on something solid. 

Chanyeol bites back a scream so hard he feels blood blooming from his lips.

The block jerks up—it’s all Chanyeol can do to vault with it—and he almost thinks he makes it, but he misses—

He _slams_ down the side of the building, shoulder screaming as it pops out of its socket.

There is Kyungsoo above him, hands wrapped around Chanyeol’s wrist, the only barrier he has between the Otherworld and the living one. 

“I’ve got you,” Kyungsoo grits out, “come on Park, don't let go.“

It feels like forever before Kyungsoo hauls him off the edge. They collapse on the floor, adrenaline fading to give way for sharp needles ravishing his body.

His vision swims.

There’s something wet beneath them.

“You’re bleeding,” Chanyeol chokes out. The sun is blinding him, and he doesn’t care. “Where?”

“Arms.”

He looks around, taking note of the bodies splayed out near the door. Kyungsoo had sniped with men coming after him, too.

“Did they arrest him?”

Even Kyungsoo’s hum is broken.

“I’m never playing decoy with any of you bastards again.”

“For retrieval,” Kyungsoo mutters, words slurring together. “Two operatives. Immediate care required. Position Delta.”

 _“Roger,”_ a voice crackles, and in the back of his mind, Chanyeol is reminded of how they’ve been communicating via the public line. _“Medics on their way. Mission success.”_

In between the biting bolt of hell as they pop his arm back and the trip back to safer headquarters, Chanyeol is reminded of many things.

The most concerning of all—

—he’d trusted Kyungsoo with his life.

The folder that arrives is heavier this time.

Written transcripts of Agent 12’s conversation where they’re caught. Last seen locations. He has pictures now—the man has a sharp nose, blonde hair. Small face. His frame is lean, fingers long, almost feminine.

He looks delicate.

Chanyeol commits it to memory.

Being with Kyungsoo is easy.

Not in a way that's light _—_ everything about Kyungsoo is heavy to some degree, but _easy,_ the way gears slide against each other just right _—_ like he's a part of a mechanism Chanyeol had long missed. 

He's quiet when the team goes over plans, but Chanyeol will look over and see his fingers roving across the route he'd been eyeing himself.

There's a special tilt to his head that tells Chanyeol he doesn't believe something will work, and Chanyeol will catch himself being smug for making him nod when he shoots the idea down. 

His fire will curl around his force, separate and yet not, twisting around it into new maneuvers that Chanyeol is scared of getting into because they feel too familiar to be comfortable.

They find each other, back to back, and Chanyeol doesn't want to dwell on how they won't need more than _left_ and _right_ to deal with one on one combat. 

The confidence that Chanyeol feels walking out on an open field after Kyungsoo's crackled _I've got you_ over the comms shouldn't exist. 

But Kyungsoo is also easy in the way Chanyeol finds himself missing _—_

There's something in the way he has them go out for food whenever they go to a new city, and how he'll bait Chanyeol into singing at the karaoke bars they collect information at. 

He has them stop at vague gasoline places in the middle of the highway, _come on,_ he says, and Chanyeol will follow, and when they're crouching on some roof he'll cross his legs and laugh at how Chanyeol gapes when he says _the stars are cool tonight._

Kyungsoo pisses him off by beating him when they race down empty roads and then he'll crack a joke and Chanyeol will have no choice but to be amused and let it go. 

"Gotta make the most of where you are," he says one time, when Chanyeol asks him why they linger behind the places they do their jobs in, why they stay.

 _Why do you pretend?_ he wants to ask, _how do you do it?_

Most times, Kyungsoo feels untouchable; the air around him buzzing with an authority that quietly said _impress me_ and _will you notice me_ and _why should you matter_ but sometimes, sometimes _—_ Kyungsoo will feel like a safe place, like his force fields on a mission.

The lie is unraveling.

Chanyeol hasn't been this careless in a long time.

They’re in Jeju when it happens. 

Another covert operation—more delicate, but still with a team, evenly distributed through the party. 

Commissioned by the local government itself, this part of the mission only entailed planting tappers to gather evidence of illegal mercury trades from down South.

There are pleasant smiles all over the crowd. There’s piano music playing from the balconies.

Chanyeol has his arm around Kyungsoo’s, slowly navigating between the seats and tables on the way to Yoo Jeonseok, head of one of the two rival tech companies in attendance.

It’s the first ever kind of close they’ve been since Daejeon.

Kyungsoo moves, his suit warm under Chanyeol’s fingers. He said he’d been working on this target for a while now, offering petty information to gain her trust.

On one hand is a glass of wine, and perched on his finger is the first tapper—designed to record and transmit all definitive versions of audio attuned to a voice sample they’d taken from one of her speeches.

The person Yoo Jeonseok is immersed in steps away, right on time. 

Standing by his side, Chanyeol bows.

This is where it goes wrong.

Yoo Jeonseok gasps, unreasonably loud. It somehow has the music cutting off, dozens of pairs of eyes now glued to where they are.

Kyungsoo stiffens underneath him, head whipping around to some perceived threat his net of force couldn’t possibly miss. Chanyeol has a small ball of flame already manifesting in his palms. 

She takes a step back, clutching at the jewels on her thin neck, and just like that, Chanyeol knows.

_Oh._

If he was being honest with himself, Chanyeol is surprised it took this long.

The move to their new hotel—two beds, this time—was filled with wary glances, such was the nature of Old Sector cities like Jeju, and ever since they came in, people would always talk to Kyungsoo, ignoring Chanyeol. 

He’d chalked it up to Kyungsoo being the only person they knew, but he knows better now.

“A _fire-rat,_ ” the woman spits.

He expected it, but the raw _fear_ in those eyes—Chanyeol can’t see hatred, not when she’s shaking, trembling—it’s more than enough to have him let go of Kyungsoo’s arm and take a step back.

His flame is out cold.

“He is a guest,” Kyungsoo manages to stop her from going any further, “ _your_ guest.”

Chanyeol has no doubt this woman has experience with the fire-wielders of the North—the ones that believed they were superior just because they had the means to destroy anything they wanted.

Chanyeol can’t even blame her. 

“Kisoo darling,” Jeonseok says, “if he’s holding you against your will, blink twice.” 

“I thought you trusted me,” Kyungsoo’s voice is smooth, almost undisturbed. The clenched fingers on Chanyeol’s arm say otherwise. “It was not my intention to surprise you. I was actually coming to introduce him.”

Kyungsoo steps forward, gently pulling Chanyeol along. 

“This is my boyfriend,” he smiles, lips curving into a heart, the picture of luxury nonchalance. “The clever one I kept telling you about. I remember you being excited to meet him.” 

“Darling,” Jeonseok says again, looking a bit more guilty, “you know how I’d confide everything to you, but—”

“Do you need proof?”

Chanyeol swallows. “I could leave, if you’re uncomfortable.” 

“Nonsense,” Kyungsoo laughs. He’s acting so carelessly, it almost convinces Chanyeol that nothing’s wrong. “C’mere.” 

Kyungsoo cups his neck, eyes looking the most sincere Chanyeol had ever seen them.

He doesn’t want for it to happen, but he gets caught in his gaze, the browns of his irises gleaming in the lights.

Chanyeol is frozen, a puppet under Kyungsoo’s fingers—they hook themselves to the side of his jaw, gentle, guiding his face down—

The kiss is tender, plush lips sliding against his.

The taste of Kyungsoo’s strawberry gloss clings to his mouth even after they pull apart, and he doesn’t process much of Jeonseok’s shallow trust right after.

His voice is small as he answers the questions, quiet as he stares on when Kyungsoo starts talking about prejudice and minorities and stereotypes. 

He watches Kyungsoo defend what is essentially a stranger and sees kindness behind his edges, empathy behind his words.

Chanyeol wonders if he might be delusional.

Kyungsoo finds him on one of the empty balconies, looking over the courtyard. He’d been leaning against the railings, letting the cold of the metal seep into his hands. 

Once all plants were successfully incorporated, it was all just a matter of posturing, making sure they didn’t look suspicious, so Chanyeol had slipped away. 

Better to not make Kyungsoo’s job harder than it already was. 

“I’m sorry,” Kyungsoo says now, voice coming from behind Chanyeol. The party’s trickled down to a few fifty or so patrons, drunk on either ego boosts or alcohol.

“What for?” 

“For not doing enough,” Kyungsoo tries to shrug, “for how they are.”

Chanyeol’s laugh is dry. “You can’t apologize for the world.”

Kyungsoo’s gaze flicks over at him, staying for a moment, eyes wide and scrutinizing.

He looks different like this: hair styled back, glitter dusting his cheeks, and Chanyeol gets a ridiculous thought of him looking like a prince. 

He leans in to bump his shoulders against Chanyeol’s.

Maybe he could excuse the closeness, for now.

Chanyeol convinces himself that this could happen to any human being—the need for companionship in the face of (albeit recent) isolation.

_This is nothing._

“When did you first find out,” Kyungsoo asks, voice unnervingly soft, “that you were dangerous?”

Chanyeol knows what he means.

His lips curl, bitterness somehow holding on to tongue.

A fleeting memory is dredged up from somewhere he didn’t know still existed—flames along skin and forgiveness he didn’t deserve.

_i didn’t mean it_

_i know you didn't_

“A long time ago.”

Chanyeol is given a video of Agent 12 dispatching ten men. He’s masked, taken on a different face and his coat hiding his limbs, but there’s no doubt about his movements.

They’re precise, fast, and most of all, advanced.

They match the records Chanyeol had managed to dig up from SM. He cross checks everything with fellow agents, and it’s all surprisingly accurate.

This only heightens his wariness.

He can’t help but feel like he’s in the eye of a storm, calm and peaceful until chaos descends.

_did you want to stay with her?_

_—perhaps._

_she was kinder than the other humans._

_cunning in her own right.—_

_then why did you leave?_

_—why does anything end?_

_—simply because everything must.—_

Their fourth mission takes the longest of all.

Coordination between a new team alone has them scrambling for weeks, and there’s the ordeal of travelling to the whole other side of the country.

They have to leave their bikes, opting instead for buses and old-style trains to avoid showing up on any radars, choosing to stay in hotels for only a day at most.

They were chasing a meeting between high officials—commissioned to stop a confirmed assassination attempt.

Chanyeol finds Kyungsoo on top of the transient house they're renting, on a rare two-day stay in Incheon.

He’d been out for the whole day, silent as he put on his jacket before dawn and even more silent as he entered the room well into the night.

He’d barely taken a step in before he was out again, grabbing a wad of cash and a 7/11 plastic bag.

Chanyeol had gone out for the cold after a talk with Jongin.

The Jumper had been more and more insistent with calling for his safety, but Chanyeol suspects it’s just because Jongin misses him.

He finds Kyungsoo sipping a bottle of soju against the railings instead.

“Park,” Kyungsoo says when he shuts the door. There's a tinge of alcohol in his voice. 

Chanyeol moves over to the little table set-up in the middle of the space; there are more—too much—soju bottles neatly stacked against one another, a whole bowl of tteokbeokki, and three rolls of kimbap.

“Ya,” he scolds, “you can’t get drunk on missions.”

“Watch me,” Kyungsoo spits, strangely defiant. He downs most of it before Chanyeol plucks the bottle out of his hands.

His face scrunches up in a scowl, bottom lip pushing up.

“Give that back.”

“Did something happen?” Chanyeol asks. He’d never seen him like this before.

Intentionally irresponsible. Intentionally reckless.

It feels like Kyungsoo stares at him for a second too long, gaze as scrutinizing as always. The wind from this high up ruffles his hair.

“Yes,” he answers, the look in his eyes turning sharp, “something happened, Park. But why do you have to know?”

The sentiment stings more than it should. 

Kyungsoo has a point—Chanyeol had no right.

“Either you figure it out,” Chanyeol says, “or you keep that shit buried until we’re finished. I can’t have you distracted.”

“Or your little mission’ll be compromised,” Kyungsoo mumbles. “Six people will die, and you’ll never get Agent 12, and you’ll live with their deaths hanging above your bed forever.”

Chanyeol can only stare.

“You think you’re the only one with something at stake?” Kyungsoo asks, reaching out to grip the sleeves of Chanyeol’s hoodie.

“It started out as a favor. A life-debt. But now Junmyeon doesn’t want me doing the shit I have a right to do and I swear to all the gods if it’s the only thing I’ve truly wanted—“

“You’re not making any sense,” Chanyeol tries to maneuver him to the stair door, “you need sleep. Let's go, Kyungsoo.“

But that's Kyungsoo clutching his wrist.

“Can I ask you to give me something?”

Kyungsoo pulls him over to the small table, and Chanyeol can only follow. Kyungsoo's touch is gentle, almost pleading, and Chanyeol doesn't know why he's so stuck up on it.

Kyungsoo sits down on one of the chairs. He opens a bottle of soju with barely a flick, and half-the bottle is downed in one motion. 

“Give me this,” Kyungsoo requests, gaze unfocused. “A night where you pretend we’re normal people doing normal people-things."

He looks down on the cityscape below.

“Friends on a random drinking session on a workday because everything’s gone to shit and they want to feel nothing for the next few hours.”

Regens couldn’t get as easily drunk as non-Regens, but that only makes Chanyeol wonder how many bottles Kyungsoo had already cleared.

“It doesn’t matter that we aren’t friends. It doesn’t matter that we’d be sent to kill each other without this alliance. Just—“

Kyungsoo breaks off, shaking his head.

"—just this once.”

The last syllable breaks, and Chanyeol wonders if this is what Kyungsoo’s vulnerability looks like.

“And then we can go back to being broken people that would’ve turned out better if the world had just been a little nicer early on.”

Chanyeol doesn’t stop the bottle being shoved into his hands.

“Can you do that for me, Park?”

Chanyeol thinks nobody could ever come up with a proper answer to everything Kyungsoo had just laid out on the table.

His silence is the gateway of the night—Kyungsoo has always had something to say, but he wasn’t usually so talkative, preferring instead to listen and store the conversation to bring up later.

Kyungsoo is drinking soju like it’s water and Chanyeol is just sipping out of respect.

Kyungsoo looks beautiful like this; cheeks pulled up in a red flush, hair messy from the hands constantly running through it.

It isn’t attraction, he promises himself it isn't—Chanyeol knows it's all drunkenness and lost inhibitions, but Kyungsoo’s smiles send bursts of warmth through his chest, every laugh brighter than the last.

Just before Chanyeol can cut Kyungsoo off the alcohol, a hand settles on his thighs.

Kyungsoo is leveling his face with his, eyes impossibly wide, like the soul they belonged to was made of space and the darkness of the oceans. 

“Do you believe in soulmates?” Kyungsoo asks.

“I think they’re nice to have,” Chanyeol answers, cautious. “Why?”

“I think,” Kyungsoo says, “they’re absolute _bullshit.”_

Chanyeol lets out a nervous laugh. “Yeah?”

“I’ve had enough people tell me what to do in my life,” he mutters, “I don’t need some bitchass stars telling me who to love.”

“You can make your own love,” Chanyeol amends. “Find a love and fight for it, or make one and protect it as best as you can.”

For whatever reason, that has Kyungsoo chuckling, shaky breaths bouncing into the night sky. Once everything dies down, Kyungsoo is back to staring at the stars, as if held by some imaginary force still.

He closes his eyes, leans back on the chair.

It's a few more minutes before it hits Chanyeol to think that he might be asleep.

He forces himself not to think about the jacket he's taking off and placing on Kyungsoo's shoulders, but it's no use—there's a voice, stubborn, gentle.

 _The night will be cold,_ it says, _and he will need your warmth._

Just as he’s tucking in the edges behind Kyungsoo’s back so the jacket doesn’t get carried away by the wind, Kyungsoo speaks, freezing Chanyeol in place.

"You're mine to protect, right?"

He checks himself: he hasn't even drunk past the bottle's neck. This is really happening. 

"Because it feels like I belong to you."

Kyungsoo's voice is so _small_ like this—like whatever he's saying is painful, like he’d have kept it in under any other circumstance.

"You'd do the same for me, right Park? I didn't get this all wrong?"

"I can protect myself," Chanyeol goes along with it, "you don't have to." 

"No," Kyungsoo slurs, slow and heavy. Chanyeol has to lean in the hear him. "I have to. I have to do this."

He doesn't know how, but Kyungsoo’s finds the back of his neck and pulls him in. 

He has them stop, faces inches away from each other, _eyes still closed,_ so near that Chanyeol can see the way Kyungsoo's hair is tussled by the wind, red flush already past his neck. 

It would be so easy.

Just a little more, just a little further and Chanyeol might know what Kyungsoo tastes like without the pretense of a mission—of necessity.

He closes his eyes, one beat, two.

_but why do you have to know?_

"I can't have you break again," Kyungsoo whispers, before Chanyeol can flinch away. "I won't be able to bring you back."

Every second feels fragile—like glass—waiting to be shattered. 

"What," Chanyeol says, cautious, "are you talking about?"

But Kyungsoo is already letting go, hand thudding to his side. 

Chanyeol will eventually realize that Kyungsoo won't be waking up to explain.

He'll see his breathing even out and have the irredeemable urge to carry him back to their room—he'll be so consumed by it that he'll be leaning to pick him up before remembering who Kyungsoo is. 

Who they are. What they're in. 

But now, as the wind cuts his cheeks, _now—_

—there's something forming in the space between Chanyeol's lungs, blooming and bright and absolutely terrifying. 

For every passing day, something builds.

Chanyeol doesn’t know when Kyungsoo progresses from ally to friend.

He doesn’t know when Kyungsoo turns into _potential_.

He doesn’t know when he gives up.

Lies are fragile things—only as strong as the willingness of the one being lied to.

Chanyeol feels it; when the delicate web breaks and reveals the mess it had tried to hide. 

They still treat each other with the distance of allies, but there’s a sense of comfort now, in between the silences, nestled in the looks they communicate with in missions.

_and then we can go back to being the broken people that would’ve turned out better if the world had just been a little nicer early on_

The last folder is an assurance.

In it is a clear tablet, much like the one at Lady Luck, and it shows Agent 12 in a cell, hands cuffed behind his back.

There’s trust, and safety, and possibly even friendship.

Chanyeol doesn’t know what to make of it.

Bonds born out of necessity rarely ever outlast their original purpose. 

_you speak with fondness._

_—do i?—_

_yes._

_was it hard to betray her?_

_well?_

_—yes.—_

_how did you do it?_

_—i tried to do it silently._ _my leash was snapping, but she awoke._ _i_ _had to bite her to escape.—_

_what did her blood taste like?_

_—like blood.—_

"Hyung," Sehun says. He'd cornerned him, but if Chanyeol was being honest, it was only a matter of time. Sehun specialized in info retrieval. "Hyung, you're slipping."

Chanyeol denies it until he leaves, but the words echo everywhere he goes.

Sehun is right, so Chanyeol pulls away. He promises to never do that again, no matter what happens.

He’s impersonal when it comes to planning for their last assignment. He ignores Kyungsoo’s attempts at conversation, little quips they'd long turned into inside jokes.

When Kyungsoo picks up on it, he moves away too, unbothered.

It was an alliance. Nothing more.

Chanyeol tamps down the feeling of wrongness in his gut—his fire is burning, licking at the surface for any sign of Kyungsoo’s force.

The fact that he was _longing—_ the fact that he wanted Kyungsoo near, is something Chanyeol thinks is natural.

Of course he would.

He forces the lie down to his heart, ignoring the itch in his feet to go where Kyungsoo is, if only to satisfy his fire’s cries for an equal.

He reminds himself every night of it, when everything is quiet and Kyungsoo’s breathing has deepened.

The threads are getting too messy.

He could convince himself that he trusted Kyungsoo because he’d witnessed his skills as a professional, but even with that, the lines are already blurred.

He tries to cut them before they get too tangled.

_This is nothing._

Their final mission is one of deep night and wild grasslands—they’re on the edge of the borders, down south, and they’ve been assigned to retrieve a group of hostages.

There’s a small shack in the middle of a field, almost an outpost, with walls made of haphazard blocks of wood and flaking paint.

It would be Chanyeol and Kyungsoo’s last operation in tandem.

Everything goes smoothly until it doesn’t. 

Kyungsoo barely has time to throw a force field over everyone before bullets start raining down on them—through the windows, through the doors—

“Zulu,” Chanyeol grips the transmitter, “backup, _now!”_

_“Zulu is 500 meters away from your position, 16. Can you maintain status until then?”_

“Not like we have a choice,” Kyungsoo grits out, shields already failing.

Chanyeol closes his eyes, focusing on the heat signatures outside the shack.

“There’s twenty, maybe thirty—call for Oscar and Tango forces and switch delta priority to B. Have them cover the perimeter and block all unknown operations.”

_“Copy. We’re coming, fast as we can.”_

“Regens,” Kyungsoo breathes, landing on one knee when the whole place _shakes._ “Earth, maybe electricity— _shit—“_

The shields flash once, twice, unbearably bright.

A great _boom_ resonates through Chanyeol’s bones, sending him and the other ten hostages sprawling.

There’s a groan from above—Kyungsoo is holding a _fucking boulder_ aloft, shattered upon impact, the pieces that would bury them under rubble kept at bay by sheer force.

Chanyeol flings a hand out, flames twisting, searching, _finding—_

There.

He curls his hand into a fist, makes sure that his fire shoves its way down their throats.

Kyungsoo barely sends the pieces flying outwards before dropping to his knees, blood streaming down his nose.

“I’ll live,” he says, putting up a hand when Chanyeol takes a step towards him. “Where are they?”

_“Eight minutes.”_

Kyungsoo’s eyes flash, white tinged in violet, palms flat against the ground.

“Their guns are gone,” he breathes, heavy pants puncturing the now eerie silence, “they’ll probably come running soon. How do you want it?”

He closes his eyes again. There are twenty surrounding the shack, and some ten more stationed deeper into the field.

If Chanyeol could round them all together…

“You handle defense,” Chanyeol clips, pulling his flames up, up, up, “I’ll deal with them outside.”

_“Six minutes to location.”_

He’s about to bolt when he sees Kyungsoo flinch.

Chanyeol follows his hand. Banking on the faint glow of the moon, there’s something dark and wet from where he’s pressing on his stomach.

In a breath, firelight illuminates the space—Chanyeol’s blood runs cold. That’s why he’d cried out. That’s why he folded.

There’s a jagged piece of boulder stuck on his side.

“I’ll live,” Kyungsoo repeats, not meeting Chanyeol’s eyes. “It’s shallow, Park. _Go._ ”

Chanyeol wants to protest. He wants to shake Kyungsoo and demand why he’d ever think Chanyeol would brush it off. He wants to carry him over to a medic.

But Chanyeol has a job to do.

He shuts a part of himself off—the part that loves to compromise agents and render missions whole failures.

The air is cold, and so is the fire in his veins.

He pulls it further up, ready for use, feeling it gather in his palms.

One breath, he’s surrounded by gentle grasslands, feather-light touches tickling his legs. The wind whips at his cheeks, drying his eyes.

The next, a circle of fire—flames at least a meter high, spinning, smaller and smaller, until he hears screams of panic and boots thudding on hard ground.

The men spot him—they start running.

 _Five minutes, four minutes, three minutes._

The stars above remain unmoved.

They descend upon him, and Chanyeol greets them.

_—do you hate me for what i did?—_

_no._

_we are all our own monsters._

It starts when a whip sears itself across Chanyeol’s skin.

It cuts a break into his patterns—has his fist stuttering in its path towards a man’s solar plexus. He’d been trying to keep the use of his fire at bay, knowing he could kill.

Chanyeol hears them—the voices in his ears— _take care of it and get us out—_ but the pain is all-encompassing, each bolt cutting into his back.

He wonders if he could have avoided this if he’d just used his powers more. If he’d been merciless, and dispatched every sick bastard holding journalists hostage within a minute.

The whip strikes him again, once, twice.

Screams are ripped from his throat.

Energy wracks his body, and Chanyeol crashes to his knees.

There’s a wall around him, flimsy, but it gives time for his fire to build, quick and rushed, in his chest.

It’s _raging—_ angry.

It calls for destruction and heat and revenge.

Breath by breath, the world fades.

His vision is tinted in gold.

He thinks he hears his name, but names don’t matter anymore.

Chanyeol is pulled into silence—he’s underwater, breathing and yet not; power flooding cold and cruel down his throat— _he can’t breathe—_

“Chanyeol,” someone says.

There are hands on his shoulders, grip tight enough to be bruising.

There’s something choking off his flames.

“ _Snap out of it_ ,” the voice growls, “come on, Park. _Come on._ ”

His fire says the world deserves to burn.

“Follow me,” the voice tries again. It’s deep and smooth and strong—Kyungsoo. “ _Chanyeol_ , come on, follow me.”

It’s enough to send the fire stuttering in his path.

He remembers another equal, another name.

It might be Kyungsoo.

The world cannot burn while he is still in it.

“Chanyeol,” Kyungsoo repeats—he’s sure of it now. “Call it back, hurry.”

He remembers fire, blazing along skin, dread rising in his stomach.

_i'm scared_

The fear of a repeat is enough—he remembers Taejung’s whimpers, sees the pain in his smile. Chanyeol can’t have the same thing happen to Kyungsoo.

His vision is getting darker.

The gold is losing its tint.

“You’re doing good,” Kyungsoo says, fingers shaking against Chanyeol’s arms. There’s a wall of hard air around them, caging his fire. “Just a little more, Park.”

Chanyeol follows Kyungsoo back to his own body. The wind is harsh against his skin. Every bit of the Regen holding him is shaking. There are men sprawled on the ground.

“Don’t,” Kyungsoo says, taking his jaw and turning it to the side. “Don’t look. They’re alive, I promise. Just don’t look _.”_

Kyungsoo’s eyes the fiercest he’s ever seen them: ghosts of desperation and determination and pain mixing in with the black of his irises.

The latch on his throat opens. 

“That’s it.”

Chanyeol is pulled back to shore, so why does it sound like Kyungsoo’s voice is still far away?

“Kyungsoo,” he chokes out, centered now, “Kyungsoo.”

“Hi,” Kyungsoo whispers, smile watery, _had he been whispering all this time_ , “you’re alright. Everything’s okay now.”

 _No,_ a voice says, and it’s his own this time, _not okay._

All at once, the parts of him he’d shut off flood him—the blood on Kyungsoo's side. The amount of power he needed to contain _pure wildfire._

He’s about to look down when Kyungsoo pitches forward, sagging against his chest, coughing up blood with every rattling breath.

”No,” Chanyeol manages to catch him. “No, Kyungsoo, we have to—“

Kyungsoo’s knees give way, and Chanyeol has no choice but to lay him down.

”Hey,” Chanyeol tries, not knowing what else to do. In the distance, there are sirens. In his arms—

“Park.”

Fear coats his tongue, has his heartbeat racing against his chest. It tastes like loss and emptiness and regret at having someone to care too much about.

“Kyungsoo, you piece of shit—you are _not_ dying while I owe you a favor—“

“You’re back,” Kyungsoo tries to laugh, but it just launches him into another coughing fit. His eyes are already closing. His breaths are coming in too shallow, too fast. 

"Stay with me," Chanyeol’s fire scrabbles for something that might help, anything but the destruction it has always known, "I followed you. I'm here. Don’t leave.”

But the fist curled around Chanyeol's shirt is loosening. Kyungsoo lets go. 

_—can you not trust the stars? i think they were right to lead me to you.—_


	6. Chapter 6

_—i have given my story. what of yours?—_

_i am forged by survival._

_and desire_

_and knives_

_and teeth_

_and an unkind world._

_it is..._

_....not worth telling._

_—why ever not?—_

_—we are not made of the things that shape us.—_


	7. Chapter 7

“ _Taejung!_ ” Chanyeol says, making him freeze. “Where are you going?”

“Leave him,” hyung snaps from the front seat. “Goodbyes with people like him are useless, Soo. He’ll forget you eventually. We have to go.”

The wolves are coming.

Hyung had only let them stay this long because they could afford it, but the identities they'd rented had long run out of time. 

He tries to choose Chanyeol as much as possible.

Kyungsoo looks at the search bar.

_Roh Taejung._

Chanyeol doesn’t believe he’s gone.

 _I miss you too,_ he writes on a separate post. _Don't cry too much, alright?_

He deletes it after a day. 

Kyungsoo sees their names pop up on his feed.

They'd gone down in a car crash.

His mother had taught him well, but who will hold him now? He will burn, and he will take the world down with him.

Kyungsoo stands at the edge of the clearing.

He watches Chanyeol crumple to the ground, face finally twisting after hours of being impassive.

He shields him from the rain, if only to make him a little less cold, a little less alone. Kyungsoo stays a long while after Chanyeol leaves.

He visits her too. She had asked him to look after her son. He gives her flowers when he can.

“Sorry,” a voice says, and Kyungsoo freezes. “Do you know where the training rooms are?”

He’s here.

His eyes are different—they’re heavier, but that’s the same chin, the same mop of unruly hair.

“You new around here?” he asks. "I could ask somebody else, or maybe you're looking for it too?"

_Chanyeol._

“Second hallway on the left,” Kyungsoo chokes out.

_Have you forgotten all about me?_

“Thanks,” Chanyeol smiles before bolting off.

The answer grazes itself on a part of him he’d long forced to kill—Kyungsoo had forgotten about Chanyeol too, but not like that.

Not irretrievable. 

Hyung was right.

_Maybe_ , Kyungsoo thinks as he stares down the board, _maybe fate has a sense of humor._

It’s them again.

Numbers instead of names—but it’s them again, just switching places on top.

He passes him by on the hallways, strong and fierce and broken. 

Kyungsoo has long grown indifferent.

Chanyeol has long since disappeared.

Nostalgia has long stopped tasting sweet.

Hyung is gone.

Kyungsoo keeps staring at the body, wrapped in white.

“That’s not him,” Kyungsoo chokes out. Hyung was never cold. _“That’s not him.”_

His knees give way—Baekhyun is there, holding him close. The one person that connected all of them: Baekhyun and Yixing and Junmyeon and Jongdae, all brothers to hyung's other family, growing up with him, giving him a home.

They had gone, too.

One by one, until Kyungsoo convinced himself that hyung would be different. 

“Soo,” he shushes, “I’m so sorry.”

“He said he’d come back,” Kyungsoo chokes out, “he— _he promised, he said—“_

The cage around his middle tightens.

“I know,” Baekhyun says. “Gods, I know.”

“Have there been any scans, how are we sure—“

A sob tears its way through Baekhyun’s chest, and that’s how Kyungsoo breaks.

Junmyeon doesn’t like it.

“Their top operatives will be after me,” he tries again, “and Baekhyun will have time to do what he needs to do.”

“Soo,” Junmyeon sighs, “we can find another way.“

“Yixing is going to die on the front doors someday,” Kyungsoo snarls. “We can’t keep having him taking missions like that.”

Everyday, Yixing enters Miocom bloodier. He says it was a debt from his parents. He says he has no choice.

“We don’t trade lives,” Junmyeon shakes his head. “I can talk to Sangtae.”

“I’m the best they have,” Kyungsoo pleads. “They can’t trace me. I've been hiding from them for years. You know SM will never give it up.”

Kyungsoo’s checked the records—their only leverage is his parents, captive and used to have him keep dealing with foreign militants to supply goods.

This is a choice Kyungsoo has already made.

“I’m sorry, Soo.” Junmyeon fixes his glasses. “This isn’t your call. Stand down.”

_“Junmyeon—“_

“Myungsoo was right about you,” Junmyeon smiles, a little wistful, a little sad.

It’s been two years.

“You always were too loyal for your own good.”

Yixing doesn’t wake up for a straight week.

The doctor says it was close. They know he won’t care; know he’ll pick himself right back up.

He holds Baekhyun’s hand, feels it shake.

“We can help him,” Kyungsoo mutters on a crying session that he’s done too many times to count, “let me do this, Baek. For the both of you.”

That has Baekhyun crying even harder.

“Kyungsoo,” he sobs, “we can’t afford to lose you too.”

“You won’t.” He pulls back, wiping his best friend’s tears. “I promise.”

Kyungsoo crashes to his knees, the neon lights blurring together in an attack of color behind his eyes.

The pavement bites into his skin.

His jacket, waterproof leather—a gift from Junmyeon, he remembers hazily—hangs from his waist.

He lasts long enough to confirm lock down on a certain location, long enough to send security measures activating in a house sitting around the bend of a cul-de-sac.

When his phone gives up, he gives up with it; folding beside a barely shaded corner behind some vague building.

His month of hiding was finished. 

He had cooked yesterday’s dinner with a more hopeful heart than necessary, confident that the ones sent to hunt him down had no idea who he was and where he might go.

He’d needed to start making his way across the country for the scheduled one month of travel, but Baekhyun had asked for help dispatching a target, and everything was fine up until the ambush—

His moan is lost in the claps of thunder.

Pain, sharp and jagged and metallic, radiates from his side, pooling into the gravel, and he can barely spare space in his head for wondering if Baekhyun might be alright, if he’d escaped.

The streetlamps are bright enough to have him watch the puddle around him turn red, matching the slowly growing spot of pink on his white shirt.

He puts up a pitiful fight against the sudden softness: it’s his body, trying to make his death a little less painful.

A name barely escapes his lips before he surrenders to the quiet of the cold and the chaos of the skies.

“Who are you,” he asks.

They meet again, but this time, it's Chanyeol that saves him. It's Chanyeol that finds him, desperate and alone. 

“What did you do to me?”

He’s convinced he’s in a dream—illusion broken only when Chanyeol has flames ready to cut into his neck.

 _You’ve changed,_ he wants to say, _but not really._

Kyungsoo sees the desperation in his eyes and _knows._

He _should have known_ , but he'd held on to the belief that Chanyeol was too high up to lead the hunt for him. He's thankful now, that he'd had the initiative to erase everything. 

He would have preferred another name—not his real one, a slip of the tongue—but what’s done is done.

He plants the seed, and watches Chanyeol water it.

Kyungsoo believes in fate now—or whatever higher force there is in the universe.

He believes it's a sick twisted bitch with an unironical sense of humor.

Chanyeol is following him.

He saves Kyungsoo from failure—gives his friends another chance.

For this, Kyungsoo helps him hunt his shadow.

“Are you alright?” Junmyeon asks, after the deal is made.

Baekhyun will have three months to retrieve Yixing’s hidden files.

Three months to work up a betrayal and flee before Chanyeol gets his hands on him.

“Baekhyun says you knew each other,” Junmyeon tries, “when you were kids.”

Maybe Kyungsoo loved Chanyeol back then.

Maybe he loved Chanyeol with a love that wasn’t tainted; maybe it was in Chanyeol that he learned loyalty, fierce and strong and _burning_.

Maybe he loved him the best he could, giggles outside the principal’s office, saving the last strawberry yakult for your best friend even when it’s your favorite too—love that thrived in the small things, like coins you’d find in the subway.

But love like that is so easily neglected, so easily forgotten.

Time had pushed forward, and it left Taejung and Chanyeol abandoned in waters too deep to bother to reach.

“It was a long time ago,” Kyungsoo says, feeling nothing. “He’s a stranger.”

Kyungsoo watches Chanyeol roast his marshmallows.

They’re around a campfire because Chanyeol’s bike is out of gas and he’d had Kyungsoo buy all types of things in a grocery store and Kyungsoo had patience he hand’t known in years running through his system.

“You seem determined to catch him,” Kyungsoo says, watching the flames. “Is it worth it?”

“He’s my severance operation,” Chanyeol says, eyes still focused on the marshmallow. “Five lives die if I don’t bring him back.”

“Five?” Kyungsoo furrows his brows. “There’s usually only one.“

Chanyeol doesn't pick up on his slip.

“If you send someone to hunt down the most dangerous man you know,” Chanyeol asks, “would you leave things up to chance?”

Kyungsoo doesn’t know what to say to that.

Hyung had trained him for survival, even when he was still small, the same way Chanyeol’s mom trained him for wonder.

“It’s already big enough,” Kyungsoo scolds him instead, “you’ll make it drop off the stick.”

The memory rises up, unbidden, _unwanted,_ shocking Kyungsoo into silence.

He was worse when they were kids—he’d let the marshmallows explode and cry about it splattering on his face.

“It’s a habit,” Chanyeol chuckles softly, “some die hard.”

Kyungsoo shoves the marshmallow in his mouth, ignoring how his tongue burns.

"A long time ago,” Chanyeol says. “I had this friend, and we were playing, I think.”

Kyungsoo doesn’t breathe.

_hold my hand then, dumbo_

_i'm scared_

“He couldn’t catch my flame, and I couldn’t call it back.”

“Do you remember them?”

It’s a while before Chanyeol answers.

“No.”

Kyungsoo had forgotten how bright Chanyeol could be. 

He laughs too much and smiles just enough, like he was the sun and everything else existed for him to take. 

He's the biggest wild card Kyungsoo's ever met. He doesn't follow plans and the only reason his subtle contradictions don't drive Kyungsoo crazy is because he'd have made them himself.

Sometimes, Kyungsoo will catch himself getting _distracted_ of all things, when he watches Chanyeol fight through a league of people through the scope of his gun.

Or when they're in a party and Chanyeol has his hair styled back, charm turned deadly. 

Or when Chanyeol looks at him with his brow raised, eyes questioning but voice silent, as Kyungsoo takes a risk and shows him the stars because he knows he's tolerated. 

He shines so much light on Kyungsoo that it's almost uncomfortable. 

With Chanyeol, he feels exposed, seen, in all the ways only some had managed to make him feel—he reads Kyungsoo like they didn't have more than ten years of silence between them. 

Kyungsoo knows he's dreaming, but it's been so long since he'd felt like someone belonged to him. 

Even if it was all just lies to begin with.

Even if it could never be, even if he knows this will end in anger and knives and betrayal. 

And it's all going to be his fault. 

“You’re getting compromised,” Junmyeon says when they meet up again. “I knew this was a bad idea.”

Kyungsoo scowls. If Junmyeon calls the operation off, Baekhyun will get stuck in the middle of sharks.

“Just because I know how to deal with him doesn’t mean I’m getting compromised.”

“I don’t know, Kyungsoo.” Junmyeon looks at him, brows raised. “You looked like you had a nice date.”

“It’s called flirting,” he rolls his eyes, “something you’d expect a Class S operative specializing in espionage to be good at.”

Junmyeon’s gaze is heavy, loaded.

He doesn’t want to know what it means.

“You two were arguing like kids,” Jongdae laughs, wrapping the bandage around his arm. “I'm telling on Baek. Start using the private lines next time, okay Soo?”

Kyungsoo huffs. “Not my fault he won’t do what you tell him to.”

“It was fun to watch,” his friend says. “And a treat to hear.”

Kyungsoo doesn’t know what to make of it. He’d thought Chanyeol would find his own way out, maybe try his luck going down the stairs.

But he’d trusted Kyungsoo, and it suddenly makes sense how Program 0112 is based off of him.

He remembers when he'd been offered a slot. 

Consistent Unpredictability, they said. When you took all the rules by heart—and then broke them. 

Kyungsoo could never do the same; he was too sane.

His force had cried out to Chanyeol’s fire, a ghost to the same way it did all those years ago, catching him, saving him.

He'd almost burned out, pulling a stunt like that, bleeding and exhausted, but Chanyeol needed him, and—

"And nothing," he forces himself to say. 

Chanyeol is right to pull away.

Things had gotten too safe between them. Too comfortable.

They were allies and nothing more—what would have been enemies sent to hunt each other if it weren’t for his plan.

There are some things you can’t ignore, and Kyungsoo doesn’t like how he trusts Chanyeol back.

He doesn’t like how everything is compounded by memories long gone—memories that deserve to be left in the past where they belong.

He doesn't like how Chanyeol manages to fit neatly into Kyungsoo; how he'd appeared again and hooked his hand around his chest and wouldn't let go. 

Here is someone that can say he’d gone through almost the same things he has, and it scares Kyungsoo more than he’d like to admit.

“I’m pulling you out,” Junmyeon’s lips are set in a thin line, eyes hard. “Are you hearing yourself, Soo?”

Baekhyun was done, all records of Yixing’s debt erased.

There was no more need to continue operations, but Kyungsoo can’t let Chanyeol go through having only a week to hunt him down.

“I can manage—“

"No," Junmeon sighs, tired and frustrated. "You can't."

He’d never seen Junmyeon like this before. Like he was biting back a sneer behind his perfect face, like he's one snap away from anger.

“I told you we nevershould’ve done this in the first place,” he says. His eyes bear into Kyungsoo, scolding. “You could’ve trusted me a bit more. This—this _thing_ you keep doing—it _has to stop,_ Kyungsoo.”

“I’m not doing anything," Kyungsoo says back. "I just, five people—"

"Terminally ill," Junmyeon's voice takes on an edge, like a dam before it breaks. Water did not like to be restrained. "They were never yours to protect."

Kyungsoo scowls. "They're mine to kill." 

“You think you’re invincible,” Junmyeon snaps, and it's different, the way Junmyeon's anger is. 

It will never be from a place that strives to _hurt,_ because he's too selfless, but that just makes it even worse.

“Just because you’re top agent doesn’t mean you can do everything you say you can do." His hands slam on the table. _"Y_ _ou have limits._ ”

The words die in Kyungsoo’s throat.

“It’s risky enough that I’ve had to think of way to pardon you,” Junmyeon half-shouts, voice hard, unyielding, “but now you want to surrender yourself?"

There are people, ready to burst through the door.

"Hyung, if you'd just hear me out—"

Junmyeon looks, _truly looks,_ with the force of rip current in his eyes, ready to bring him down. _"You_ _can't save every broken thing that comes your way."_

More than the five lives at stake, he’d wanted to save Chanyeol.

It had gone to the point of Chanyeol murmuring his worries at night, contemplating how things might have gone different if he were born without powers.

If he would have been just as cursed.

“I’ll save this one."

Kyungsoo is already walking away.

“You’ll put Miocom in danger,” Junmyeon throws out, making his hand halt on the door handle. “You’ll risk everyone you know. You’ll risk _Baekhyun_. It’s him Chanyeol thinks is Agent 12, or did you forget?”

Kyungsoo grits his teeth.

He could pull it off.

He had to.

Kyungsoo wakes up with a hangover and a dream: of pulling Chanyeol close and feeling his breath flash hot against his skin. His voice had mingled with the sting of the wind on their cheeks, and the warmth of his jacket had seeped in through the pads of Kyungsoo's fingers. 

_—I want to come clean but I love Baekhyun and Yixing and I can't ask you to fight for them but fuck if I won't fight for you too—_

And the look in Chanyeol's eyes has him doubting his own version of truth; but there's no more time for doubt. 

Chanyeol distances himself again, but it’s too late.

The three months are up.

Hyung had died this way too—trying to go back to a burning building because of some kid he hasn’t even met.

He’d left Kyungsoo alone.

Stubbornness, it seems, ran in the family.

When Kyungsoo wakes up, there's a needle stuck to his wrist, and Chanyeol is busy placing bottles on a small table.

"Park," he manages, throat filled with cotton and chest filled with lead. He can barely breathe. He can barely remember. "You alright?"

Chanyeol stops, hands halting from where he'd started to reach in the plastic bag. It lasts only for a second—he places Pocari Sweat on the surface, and brings out a pack of strawberry yakult.

From there, he arranges the jackets thrown haphazard on the backs of chairs, folding them neatly. 

He opens up the curtains. He lets in the light. 

When he can find nothing else to do, he finally makes his way over. 

His eyes—they're shining, wet and red. His hair is messy, like he'd walked through a storm, and his coat is ruffled in so many places Kyungsoo wonders if he's slept in it. 

"What happened?" Kyungsoo asks. There are snippets, fire and _follow me, come back,_ "I can't—everything feels wrong—"

"You burned out," Chanyeol cuts him off. "You would have—"

He stops himself, a tick going off in his jaw. 

He fails. 

"You _stupid idiot,"_ Chanyeol whispers, voice thick. "You _reckless,_ _stupid, piece of shit._ "

Kyungsoo had never seen him like this before. 

"You barely made it, what the _fuck_ were you thinking?"

And then it slams back to Kyungsoo. Everything. The whip. Chanyeol's fire, lighting up the night. 

He remembers Chanyeol's mother—the one that took care of him too, remembers how she had made Kyungsoo promise to look after her son. 

He remembers holding him, remembers how Chanyeol's fire had wanted so badly to ravage Kyungsoo from the inside out. 

"I—" Kyungsoo swallows. There are bags under Chanyeol's eyes. His fingers—they're trembling. "I'm sorry?" 

Kyungsoo stays silent while Chanyeol tells him what happened.

He says it was a close thing.

He says his Regen blood couldn’t help because too much had leaked out onto the grass beneath as Chanyeol held him.

He says Miocom operatives had come to visit him, and that it’s been a whole week since the ambush.

“You look like shit, Park,” Kyungsoo tries to tease. Even if it’s obvious. Even if Chanyeol looks pale and scared and desperate. “Your mission’s got you that rattled?”

Chanyeol looks at him with the weight of a forest fire. He starts slowly, like he can’t believe he still has to say the words out loud.

“The thought of you dying had me shaken up too.”

There’s danger in words like those—because they represent a chance. Because they beg you to take a risk. 

Chanyeol throws the dice first.

“I really thought you’d be gone,” he says, words getting more and more strangled by the second. “I couldn’t believe it—I—“

”You don’t have to,” Kyungsoo whispers. He’s scared too. “I get it.”

”No,” Chanyeol shakes his head. He points to the far side of the room, where a blanket and some pillows are arranged neatly on the side of a long chair. “You don’t.”

He tells Kyungsoo of how cold his blood had run when he’d come from the hospital cafeteria to find an empty bed.

He tells him how he’d had all his meals in the room since; of how he couldn’t bear it if Kyungsoo had gotten worse.

_This will be how much I will break._

“You won’t have to worry anymore,” Kyungsoo cuts him off. If he has to hear any more of how Chanyeol’s grown to care for him he might just wish he’d died in his arms that night instead. “You’ll have Agent 12 soon.”

Chanyeol’s train of thought halts to a stop. His eyes shine like they’re making up for the words he was supposed to say.

”Can I ask you to give me something too?” He takes Kyungsoo’s wrist, turns it around. ”Let me hold you.”

The thought splits something inside Kyungsoo so cleanly he thinks he hears it in the silence of the room. 

“Just an assurance. So I can go back and be sure that this is real. That you’re alive. Please.”

Kyungsoo remembers now, with the clarity of memory not muddled by a hangover—soju and cold winds and Chanyeol’s breath tickling his closed eyes.

_You’re mine to protect, right?_

”Okay,” Kyungsoo barely hears himself. “Okay.”

Before he knows it, Chanyeol’s arms are behind his back. He’s so _solid_ —like this space was all Kyungsoo ever needed to feel safe. Like all it took was some fire-wielder that was just as broken as he was, just as hopeful.

Just as likely to laugh in the face of the world’s harshness.

_Because it feels like I belong to you._

Kyungsoo wants more. He wants to hook his hand behind Chanyeol’s neck and pull him in for a kiss, wants to sleep in one bed like the first few days of whatever they had and feel Chanyeol's warmth seeping into his side.

He wants to know just how bright Chanyeol can make him burn.

But Kyungsoo stops himself.

He lets Chanyeol tighten the hug as he buries his head on Kyungsoo’s shoulder, lets him curl his fingers around his hospital gown.

He goes no further. 

When Jongdae comes, it's to plead. 

"Don't do this," he says, but Kyungsoo is long gone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes i gave kyungsoo flaws what about it


	8. Chapter 8

_perhaps another time._

_my story can wait._

_—are you afraid of what i might think of you?—_

_no._

_—then why?—_

_you place me too high;_

_as high as the stars that led you to me._

_i am afraid you will blame yourself for what i am._

Chanyeol is dreaming. 

Everything is quiet. They're in one of SM's safehouses, stationed at the edge of the country. 

He'd called them up, because Kyungsoo had shown live footage of Agent 12 being taken into a car.

He'd gone to escort him personally, and one of their operatives—a man with a cat's smile, had volunteered to be the final assurance in their agreement. 

Miocom would be better off for his involvement, Junmyeon had said. More savings from commissions, and even a pardon from the government on any operative it chose. 

When Kyungsoo had walked in alone, Chanyeol had readied Junmyeon's box. He'd threatened to have each and every one of Junmyeon's family die before winter ends. 

_Give him to me,_ he'd said, _or I'll make sure each and everyone he knows will burn._

But Kyungsoo had stayed silent. 

He'd walked in front of Chanyeol, leveled his forehead to the barrel of the gun. 

Chanyeol had wondered if that's what he looked like, the first time he'd asked Kyungsoo to kill him. 

Kyungsoo had looked at him. 

Exhaled like it hurt to breathe. 

"You have cuffs," Kyungsoo had said, "don't you?"

And then the pieces slid into place.

It was terrible—

—a monster he'd never expected to exist. 

It wreaks havoc in his chest, breaking and splitting and slicing at anything it can find. 

_It makes sense,_ it laughs, wild and ugly, _you should have known._

Kyungsoo's skills. 

The way he managed to rival Chanyeol in everything. 

There's usually only one, he'd said that night, when Chanyeol revealed the five lives that depended on him. Like he knew. 

"No," Chanyeol whispers. He doesn't drop the gun. _"_ _No."_

_You should have known._

"Please," Kyungsoo mutters, "please just get this over with."

"You lied," Chanyeol chokes out.

He needs a confirmation. A final slap to reality. A final break to the dream that is Do Kyungsoo—

A chance that should have never been nurtured.

"Yes," Kyungsoo breathes.

The monster takes it.

It takes the shard the one syllable shoves down Chanyeol's throat and paints him bloody. 

"Yes, I lied."

Chanyeol had never known people could break like this. 

There's a pressure in his chest, a space the monster is keeping from expanding, filled with _how could you_ s and _I trusted you_ s and _why did you have to do this me—_

There is a different kind of pain, Chanyeol thinks, one that your heart can't keep, one that bleeds into your body and squeezes at your throat until you forget how to breathe and all you will know is the irony of the universe—

—how it made you go through all that tenderness just to rip it away in the end, quick and painful, a whirlwind in your heart and wildfire in your soul—

He thought he'd known the worst kind of pain all those years ago—when his parents had left him alone to deal with a world that hated him.

Now he knows better. 

"Turn it into anger," Kyungsoo advises. As if he had the right to give him comfort. "It'll hurt less."

Chanyeol blinks. Once. Twice.

His mechanisms slide into the place. 

He had a job to do. 

His fire would never abandon him. It would never leave. Chanyeol lets it take over. 

He growls, taking Kyungsoo by the collar and slamming him into the wall. 

It’s not _enough—_ he wants Kyungsoo to feel the pain in his bones. 

The wood boards creak under their weight.

Kyungsoo doesn't fight, doesn't move. Chanyeol wishes he would. He wishes Kyungsoo would give him any excuse to let him burn. 

_You can't even do it on your own,_ the monster cackles, sensing the automatic stop in his thinking when it came to the idea of Kyungsoo getting hurt, _can you?_

"Like this?" 

He does it again and again, hands curling into the leather of his jacket, only stopping when Kyungsoo fails to stifle a cry and he looks down.

He'd already been burning—Kyungsoo's skin is an angry red, and the cloth underneath his fingers is steaming. 

Chanyeol lets go with a shout, come from the depths of his chest. 

"SM said to bring you back alive," he snarls. 

"Chanyeol."

He doesn't look. He tells himself it's because he can't stomach the look of a traitor's face. 

In truth, in the small, tucked into the side of his heart that isn't seeing the light truth, he's afraid. Chanyeol is afraid that if he looks at Kyungsoo's face he'll break into pieces too small to fit back together. 

"Agent 12," he forces. His voice cuts through the safehouse, hard as steel. "You are under arrest." 

Kyungsoo doesn't talk—only gets on his knees when Chanyeol pushes him down and shoves a tablet in his face. 

"DK1201S6EY," he says, voice dead. "LO883102."

Things weren't supposed to end like this—but then again, Chanyeol should have seen this coming.

All this suffering because he wanted to feel like someone had him. 

_"Agent 012,_ " an automated voice had rung out. _"Location locked: Jeju, safehouse J87. AK5 countermeasures complete. Experiment 61 progress: blackout clearance, voluntary termination. OR16281 cleared, awaiting official confirmation."_

At some point, Kyungsoo says he was just doing a job. He says it was never supposed to happen. 

"I hate you," Chanyeol spits. It’s terrifying: just how much he means it. _"I hate you."_

Kyungsoo's voice is strangled. Resigned. "I know." 

When Chanyeol was young, Airtravs were new. 

The world had waited on it, expecting sleek silhouettes and white paint and smooth bodies. Instead, the prototype was a hulking mass of brown mismatched parts; its magnets, tentacles 50 feet long, looking like it would crash down at any minute. 

Now though, expectations are met. 

SM arranges a whole Airtrav for transport, coupled with an entourage following them down below. If Kyungsoo wanted to escape, he'd have air to hide in. 

The flying contraption could easily fit a whole tour group, except it has a mini-prison already installed right beside its massive window.

Airtravs were used for a picturesque experience, with whole panels made of glass. 

They usually used this as a viewdeck, but Chanyeol thinks that it’s a good as any place to waste his time while guarding Kyungsoo.

Chanyeol doesn’t know what game Kyungsoo is playing.

“I missed you,” he says one night. “When we had to leave and fake everything. Hyung ran into serious trouble, and we weren’t supposed to stay in Busan for long anyway, but. I missed you.”

Chanyeol doesn’t reply.

The revelation of him being Taejung didn't even faze him.

Agent 12, childhood best friend, it didn't matter.

It never would again. 

He keeps his eyes on the scenery in front of him, mountains and grass and stars of Jeju.

“Your Mom told me to take care of you,” Kyungsoo says again, for the next night. “She was worried you’d go too far one day and never come back.”

There’s the sound of shuffling. Chanyeol sees Kyungsoo’s back settle on the bars an arm’s length from his.

“There wasn’t anyone else that could. I was supposed to protect you. I’m sorry for leaving.”

Chanyeol stands up. Kyungsoo doesn’t deserve to see the wetness in his eyes.

“When I first met you,” Kyungsoo says, the night after, “I was really on my way to ask if we could be friends.”

Chanyeol snorts, a sharp puff of breath.

“But you looked like you didn’t want anyone else to come near you. So I left you alone. A couple changes of heart later, I see this kid crying in a ditch.”

Chanyeol had always thought silent anger was dangerous—when all you’d feel was anticipation bearing down on your bones and the quiet grit of your teeth against each other.

When the pressure turns it into a knife-point.

“I wish I’d never met you,” he says, having some other operative cover for him.

“I wish I’d never met you too,” Kyungsoo tries again the next night. They have a week left. Chanyeol wonders if he can get in a final favor by having them change his post.

“Shut it,” he growls, not ready for another shitty revelation about his past or feelings or Chanyeol’s dead mother.

“But I think we would’ve met no matter what.”

Chanyeol sighs, the sound small against the backdrop of the scenery below.

“We were always somehow together,” Kyungsoo mumbles, “weren’t we?”

The boards, the constant comparison. Everything.

“It always ends in you fucking me up,” Chanyeol says, the words carrying an edge too heavy to be told any other way. “Doesn’t it?”

Even in the dim moonlight, he can see Kyungsoo flinch.

Four nights before they arrive in Seoul, Kyungsoo stops talking.

Chanyeol convinces himself that the silence is preferable.

That the anger in him is righteous; that one more word would’ve had him burning down the Airtrav and leave them crashing onto the street below.

But too much silence leaves too many things to be filled—silence demands you break it, and the monster inside him has been waiting for new ways of tearing him apart.

Two nights before Kyungsoo is surrendered, the hurt creeps up on him, hiding behind the flimsy veil of peace.

There had been a lull in the things that needed to be prepared. Either that, or Chanyeol had run out of things to distract him. 

He's settled against the window, leaning his weight on the glass.

There are no other paths Chanyeol's thoughts can wander. 

The good memories seem so long ago.

“Gods,” he starts, and it’s almost funny, just how deep Kyungsoo’s betrayal _cuts_ _,_ “gods _.”_

The city lights blink back up at him, unamused.

The night sky is vast, unconcerned.

The stars keep watch, uncaring.

There is no one but Chanyeol and the _thing_ slashing ribbons inside his chest, slow and overwhelming.

_I was just doing a job._

“You were just doing a job,” he starts, the smallness of his voice a sharp contrast to the rumbling in between his lungs, “but why—gods—“

He thinks he hears something inside him _crack._

“Chanyeol,” he hears, but he doesn’t care.

“You didn’t have to be _nice,_ ” he chokes out. Something is squeezing at his throat. “You didn’t have to be so _familiar_ and safe and I—I—“

He can’t pull up enough air, hiccupping into his gasps—

“I’m sorry,” Kyungsoo tries, “I didn’t want this to happen, Chanyeol.”

“Why,” Chanyeol whips around, and there’s a different kind of fire in his veins, soft, deadly, _“what did you think would happen?”_

Chanyeol almost thinks Kyungsoo’s eyes are filled with regret.

He knows better now.

“Why did you have to do it,” he says again, standing up, face twisting, hands reaching out to slam against the bars, “answer me.”

He repeats it—

— _why, why, why—_

 _—_ every word another metallic clang ringing through the space, every syllable rising, more and more until he’s shouting, trying to let go of the pressure in his chest.

The thing ravages him, travels inside, pulling and tearing until it’s left with the barest of confessions.

He slowly falls to his knees.

Beneath anger, beneath hurt, there must always be vulnerability.

“Why,” Chanyeol whispers.

He feels like a wasteland.

"Why did you have to make me trust you?”

He knows what betrayal is like.

He knows what it is to always be up against the world—to have everything be packaged in intentions you have to shield yourself from and tricks you have to memorize.

But with Kyungsoo—

“I trusted you,” he repeats, the shards are so _sharp_ , “you felt so safe, like _home_ but not, and I—I really thought—“

“Chanyeol,” Kyungsoo tries again.

“You didn’t have to make me feel like I was less alone.”

_“Chanyeol—“_

“You didn’t have to make me fall for you.”

The syllables come out mangled together, the headiest mix of pain and disappointment Chanyeol has ever experienced.

“You just had to do your job.”

“Please,” Kyungsoo begs, “please just let me—“

“Let you what?”

Chanyeol’s laugh is the emptiest it’s ever been. The ocean inside him is receding again. Just like that. He wishes it were enough.

“Explain that you didn’t mean it? That you fell for me too?”

His face twists into a sneer, anger coming back to protect him.

He will always have his fire.

“Save it.” He takes a deep breath, wiping his eyes. “I have enough lies to last me a lifetime.”

_—then will you let me stay?_ _i have kept you warm this night.—_

_with your tales of blood and cages._

_—i suspect you have more.—_

_yes._

_why would you want that?_

_—the world hurts us in different ways._

_the stars have led me to you, and i know now that it is because our thorns are the same.—_

“Are you alright, hyung?”

Chanyeol has his hands in his pockets. The cold penetrates into his fleece gloves, but only because he lets it.

Rooftops always made the city lights smaller. They look like a tapestry—flickering as the night goes on, a reflection of the map of stars above.

“Nini,” he greets, “what brings you here?”

He’s not sure what time it is—but Jongin’s hair is messy under his beanie, and his scarf is barely tied together. Late, or probably very early. “Sehun says you’ve been doing this a lot lately.”

Chanyeol tilts his head. “Doing what?”

“Hyung,” Jongin comes to stand beside him. “Don’t be stubborn. We’re worried about you.”

“Worried,” Chanyeol snorts, “do you and Sehun gossip about me before or after sex?”

Jongin huffs. “We do it whenever you use the bakery downtown as an excuse to pass by SM.”

It’s been a month since he’d terminated his contract. A month since Kyungsoo had been silent as they forced him to his knees, a month since he’d looked at Chanyeol one last time.

Chanyeol had muttered _I hate you_ to himself so many times. 

He has a talent for lying, for using it as a cushion against the knives of truth—so why wasn't this one holding on?

Why didn't he believe it?

At first, Chanyeol couldn’t figure out what to do.

SM was all he had, and “Experiment 61” was all he’d known. He had enough savings to tide him over for his lifetime.

“Rest,” was all he answered to anyone that asked.

“Do you believe in soulmates?” Chanyeol asks now, a familiar tightening in his throat.

It had, at least, gotten more manageable.

Jongin shakes his head. “No.”

“They say any separation between them isn’t neat,” Chanyeol’s lips twist into a sad smile. “They say it’s because any part you cut will always have some part of the other.”

He wonders if this is what Mom and Dad loved to talk about.

He can’t imagine why—it’s stubbornly painful.

Jongin reaches for his hand with the same gloves Chanyeol had given him for his birthday.

“What did he take from you?” Jongin squeezes, voice small. “Hyung.”

Chanyeol doesn’t answer, but Jongin has learned to wait—a special patience Chanyeol knows the people around him have developed.

For a short while, they watch drunk college kids make their way around neighborhoods and cars swerve around corners with their light on low.

At first, Chanyeol had hated how everything reminded him of Kyungsoo. It probably couldn’t be helped. His fire yearned.

But a week had turned into two, and then three.

The anger had morphed into something heavy, metallic—settling between his lungs.

Sometimes, it hurt to breathe.

_Too much._

_He took too much._

“Nothing,” Chanyeol’s voice is thick. “Don’t worry about it.”

He doesn’t say how his fire is different now, heavier, like there was something else mingling with the flames.

He doesn’t say how his fire had learned to look for an anchor, and how it cried out for Kyungsoo, the same way he’d cried for Chanyeol the night he’d lost himself in his power.

He doesn’t know until when the lie can hold.

_i suppose it cannot be helped._

_stay then._

_but i cannot imagine why._

_—i am your soulmate.—_

_—the stars will give us flowers of our own.—_

“Agent 12,” Chanyeol announces.

It’s the same blond hair, the same graceful fingers.

The other part to Kyungsoo’s betrayal.

“Agent 04,” the man corrects, settling in front of him.

Sehun had asked to meet him this afternoon, saying he wanted coffee. 

He’d only described the café as “some hippie shop downtown”, but Chanyeol had walked around the city enough to know where he meant.

The shop is quaint, piano music twisting through the air. A server comes to bring him coffee and snacks, and Chanyeol spends time watching the wind scrabble through bare tree branches. 

He usually didn’t entertain strangers, but he could at least trust Sehun.

“I'm Baekhyun,” the man says, lips pulling up in a handsome smile. "Byun Baekhyun."

“I don’t care,” Chanyeol sips at his coffee. He makes sure his tone is neutral. Routine, nothing more. “What do you want?”

The man raises his brows, head tilt almost playful. He reminds Chanyeol of a child.

“I want to get Kyungsoo back,” the man says. At least he’s blunt. “And I need your help.”

“I’m retired.” There it is again—a stone, dropping in his gut. “I don’t do commissions anymore. I don’t care about whatever payment you’ll wave in my face either.”

“Don’t you miss him?”

Chanyeol makes sure his laugh is mocking.

_Yes._

_It's ridiculous how much I miss him._

“No.”

The man’s face twists into a scowl, but even that is slight, like any attempt at being negative isn’t welcome to him. Chanyeol realizes that his hair is shockingly white.

“You mean to tell me,” the man leans forward, “my best friend sacrificed his freedom for an ungrateful bastard?”

Chanyeol takes a cookie and dusts off his hands.

It's only been three months, but the whole severance operation feels like it's been years.

There is a distance now, strange, because one day he'll look back and have nothing but spite go through his system but there'll be nights on his bike and he'll speed up and expect another rider to taunt and laugh and pass him by.

“Your best friend wouldn’t have had to do that if he didn’t steal the Motherheart in the first place.”

He’d included as little involvement to Miocom as possible, as a last service to Kyungsoo.

He’d remained blank as Chanyeol rattled off false information, indisputable because of blackout clearance.

“And frankly, this ungrateful bastard’s tolerance for another one of him is very low.”

A last goodbye, _pathetic_ , because even in the face of being betrayed, he knew what it was like to have people to protect.

He would do the same.

“He could have left you to chase after air,” the man says, apparently shaken at Chanyeol's quick refusal. “He could have—he didn’t need to—but he did, and—“

“I didn’t ask him to,” Chanyeol replies coldly. “I would’ve hunted him down all the same.”

“Not without six ghosts trailing after you,” the man shoots back. “I didn’t come here to get rejected, 61.”

“I came here to meet Sehun,” Chanyeol throws back. “Have a good day.”

His fire screams at him.

He ignores it, just like always. 

Chanyeol blames it on Jongin and Sehun today.

He’d been trying to find other reasons for it: why he’d eventually caved.

A whole team had come after Byun Baekhyun: Zhang Yixing and then Kim Jongdae and then Kim Junmyeon.

He'd rejected all of them, even when they'd shared Kyungsoo's motivations.

If anything, they made Chanyeol angrier. 

Kyungsoo was stubbornly loyal to everyone except Chanyeol.

"No," Baekhyun had said, when he'd muttered it under his breath. The man had taken it a habit to corner Chanyeol anytime he could.

Chanyeol didn't know why he'd only let him.

"He chose you that day, and all the days after."

Chanyeol had only gotten up and left. 

Now, he's making it past Miocom's hallways.

It was much like SM, though with less people, and it was warmer.

In his hands is a folder—the last bit of paperwork needed to pull off the pardon from the government, promised because of the same mission Kyungsoo had almost died in. 

His fire lies inside him, curling, waiting. 

“I’ve been hoping for you,” Kyungsoo says, something pulling at the side of his lip.

He's thinner now. His fire reels back in indignation—his force is a shadow of what it once was.

There's something missing from him—so plainly clear, and a part of Chanyeol wonders if it was the same for him: if Chanyeol had taken as much as Kyungsoo did from him.

“I’m sorry,” Chanyeol rolls his eyes anyway, “did you wait too long, Your Majesty?”

“You here to break me out, Park?” 

Chanyeol wants to bite. He wants to quip and laugh and joke again, wants to feel Kyungsoo’s humor slide against his. He wants to feel him, mingling with the flame in his veins. 

There’s something manifesting in the space between them, as heavy as a loaded gun.

"Yes," he says. He pulls the trigger. "You coming?"

"Oh for fuck's sake," Chanyeol mutters, pulling a shirt over his head.

The first three times the doorbell had rung were evenly spaced enough for Chanyeol to think the person on the other side had gone before being corrected.

”I'm _retired!"_

Junmyeon had given him an offer again, this time with an envelope. 

_EXO,_ it said. A team. 

"I don't care who you are," he shouts, "I'm tired of you people!" 

His rejections are ready for Baekhyun's stupid grin or Yixing nervous hands. 

He opens the door.

"Chanyeol."

And closes it.

He slides down to the floor, heartbeat hammering in his chest. It's been a month since he'd cut ties with all of them. A month since he believed he could let Kyungsoo go.

A month of failing, of feeling a tightening in his limbs that wanted him to _run._

"Wait," Kyungsoo says from the outside. "Wait, Chanyeol, please. I know—I know you hate me. I just—Junmyeon won't let me into my own apartment if I don't try and convince you to join, and I can't imagine why he'd want _me,_ and I kept telling him—"

Kyungsoo stops.

It's a while before he speaks again.

"Please," he knocks, "I need—I know you feel it too. Please, Chanyeol."

"Feel what?" Chanyeol asks, just as his fire surges again.

Calling to his flame has always been a feeling first—seconds before a race starts, standing a few meters before a cliff drop.

It's been a constant pressure under his skin for months now.

He stands, scrabbles at the locks. 

For _months,_ he'd been stuck on that feeling, like his fire wanted to reach out. 

Chanyeol thought he'd get used to it and its yearning, tried to find way to exhaust its power.

But he was wrong. 

Now, as he takes in the sight of Kyungsoo in a pullover and jeans, he realizes he could have never gotten used to it. 

_I missed you._

"Me too," Kyungsoo says. Takes his hand.

It shouldn't feel like it belongs in his. It shouldn't have fit so nicely.

"I—can we figure this out?"

"There's nothing to figure out," Chanyeol manages.

Kyungsoo's eyes look up at him, filled with something unreadable.

"Then why," he says, slow and almost hopeful, "why aren't you letting go?" 

His fire finds what he's looking for. 

"Please," Kyungsoo tries again. "Come on, Park."

All that's left is Chanyeol. 

"Okay," he says. "Okay."

He steps aside to let Kyungsoo in, and the sight of him looking around is jarring. Not for Kyungsoo himself, but the thought that occurs right after: he belongs there.

With Chanyeol.

Maybe fate wasn’t done with them yet.

Maybe, no matter how much Chanyeol wanted their threads to be cut, mortals like him couldn’t make much of a difference. 

Maybe, just maybe, the stars had a point.

Kyungsoo extends a hand towards him.

”Hi,” he says, voice ringing out into the space around them.

Chanyeol raises his brows. Stares at Kyungsoo’s hand, still waiting. “What are you doing?” 

“I want us to solve this as Park Chanyeol and Do Kyungsoo,” comes the reply. “But we never had that. It was always Taejung or Experiment 61 or Agent 12.”

There’s something—and Chanyeol’s used to it now, the _pull,_ the reaching out, like they were once a whole, a hand sinking into his chest and tugging at his heart. 

Pink and gold and red filter in through the windows. Outside, the sun is setting.

“I’d like to meet you again, Chanyeol. The proper way.”

Chanyeol thinks about all the things he’s lost. He knows that he will still have so much more to lose.

He takes Kyungsoo’s hand. 

The warmth that travels through his core tells him he’s got just as much to gain anyway. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello!!! have you made it this far? thank you so much for reading!!
> 
> I can't thank the mods enough for being patient with me. I was the most starved person when it came to chansoo MAMA Powers AUs, and it's just self-sustenance at this point tbh.
> 
> It was a tricky ride writing this, but I had a lot of fun, and maybe proved a few things to myself along the way. 
> 
> i'll attach a new chapter (or work, make it a series) after reveals, because i enjoyed writing them in the setting here—maybe snippets on how chansoo rebuilds their relationship in a team (exo). 
> 
> my twt and additional notes on the fic itself can be found [here](https://twitter.com/mirasolexo/status/1345580658718957568?s=20%20) !
> 
> if you liked it, please consider leaving ur thoughts in comments and kudos <3


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